Putting the McHale Coaching Malcontents to Rest (Hopefully)

The youngest team in the NBA with room for another max contract is in playoff contention in the super competitive west. I can cut McHale some slack even if I disagree with many of his decisions.

 

And even if you disagree with his decisions, there's no reason to think that yours are right and his wrong.

[not aimed at you in particular, but in general]

I'm sure McHale makes some mistakes, but I've been very surprised by his coaching over the last 2 years. We've had some fantastic results in that time, many very unexpected ones.

 

delete

 

I agree. Everyone talks about his rotations but the fact is that in order to have a strong bench, you have to develop them also. It is important for our bench to play critical moments too and this season is the one to do it since its technically still our rebuilding season, next season is more of the real deal. I think many of lost sight of that.

 

You're really abusing statistics, OP.

 

He is a decent coach. The fact of the matter is there are few good coaches in this league and a whole lot of mediocre coaches.

 

Because you've made an illogical leap from the study. You can't go from:

"We therefore find little evidence that most coaches in the NBA are more than the “principal clerks” that Adam Smith claimed managers were more than 200 years ago.""

To:

"Any complaint lodged against McHale for substitutions, playing time or in game play calling is statistically insignificant. In other words it does not matter over the course of the season."

You're taking the mean of every coach in the league and assuming that that average applies to every coach when in reality there are coaches that are worse than the average coach and coaches who are better than the average coach.

What you could say is:

It's unlikely the next coach the Rockets hire will have any significant positive impact on player performance.

 

I don't think that's what he's saying. But rather a coach cannot be judged by any particular play on the court relative to an NBA season. Of course you can judge coaches. But it should be from a macro standpoint. What a team accomplishes vs what the team could potentially accomplish. Obviously, this "potential" is unknown and therefore a guess on the part of fans, coaches, and GMs. But I'm quite sure no fan felt that the Rockets potential at the beginning of the season to be 50-win team. If so, then our current pace of ~44 wins is either on par with potential, or being better. If McHale can coach this team to its potential, then he is at the very least a good coach.

 

Not sure how I feel about atomic thread (the end all coaching debate thread), but I agree. McHale seems like a pretty good coach IMO, and people are just trying to throw their frustrations at him. Besides we are over-achieving for the youngest team in the NBA. So does that make McHale one of the best coaches?

 

Yes, this is true. But I'm just disagreeing with the conclusion jtr drew from the study. Because most coaches do not measure out as having an impact does not mean that every coach doesn't have an impact. In fact, it is a statistical certainty that at least some coaches do have a significant impact (positive or negative), but you cannot then say that that fits every coach in the league.

 

Most bench players do not have a statistically significant impact on defense relative to starters.

Should I make a thread that anyone calling Jimmer Fredette a bad defender or Taj Gibson a good defender is categorically wrong?

 

Here is something I posted on the subject in the I Hate McHale thread:

Here is an interesting opinion on evaluating coaching:

http://wagesofwins.com/2012/09/26/evaluating-the-coaching-the-coach-is-wrong-redux/

Only a few coaches actually make their players individual production rise in a statistically significant fashion.
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[chart]
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We, as NBA fans, may hear a lot of noise about what a difference a great coach can make. I can even list some of the more commonly repeated refrains :

He’s a leader.
He’s a motivator.
He inspires his team.
He makes his team better.
But as Dave notes, this is not – for the most part – generally true. The simple truth is that NBA coaches are in general evaluated improperly. For the most part, Players are who they are and coaches don’t generally affect that (with the aforementioned exceptions).
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Coaches matter because they decide who plays

The graph that follows contains every player season for every team since 1978 for the National Basketball Association with greater that 100 Minutes Played. Each point represents a player playing for one team for one season and shows their minutes played per game and their Wins Produced per 48 minutes played. It looks like so:
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[chart]
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In essence this is a graph of a player’s perceived value in the eyes of their coach (as represented by the minutes played per game) and their actual value (as represented by their actual productivity in WP48 using the new wins produced model). The thing that jumps out very quickly is that while there is correlation between perceived and real value (see the R2 = 27%) that only accounts for 27% of the variation we see.

This reinforces a point that we’ve been emphasizing recently. Playing the right guys is a non trivial skill. The data shows that there are real differences on a year to year, team to team basis in what actually gets players on the court. Teams and coaches simply do not play their best players; instead they play the players who they think are their best players.

That makes all the difference in the world.


Coaches do matter, but not in the ways that the media tries to sell us. It’s about who they put on the court. The surprising thing is that proper allocation of those minutes is actually a rare skill.

The piece is part of a series.

If I understand their point, the argument is that even if the coach gets to play Jordan and Pippen, for most coaches, coach's greatest impact is in allocating minutes, especially with the non-star players of the team.

Seems to me the analysis is too incomplete but touches on the key thing being that coaches play players to fill roles and duties. To get at the why of minute allocation, maybe we look at a coach's system/philosophy as the lens through which they perceive the talent on the roster?

I thought this might be interesting given many comments on McHale's rotation.

 

McHale is great to develop the team in long term, but definitely not a in game coach. He's good for developing this young team, but he will cost us when it is playeoff where his in-game decision mistakes will be punished.

 

mchale should prove his coaching by starting at pf for the rockets
if he sucks (and he will, he's old) he should get fired
end of discussion