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Ranking Coaches - bring your own salt:

Discussion in 'NBA Dish' started by jtr, Feb 23, 2014.

  1. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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    From stats for the NBA, which puts out some of the best NBA fan stats this side of SportsVU and Synergy.

    Like I said, you probably need some salt with this ranking. A few things. McHale ranks higher than I would have expected. But my take overall is that the algorithms that calculate this ranking at least on their surface seem to be in the ball park. Both the Van Gundy's rank highly in defense. Coach Thib and Skiles have everyone beat in that category though. Seems about right. Scott Brooks leads all coaches. This might seem to indicate that the ranking may be based on expected wins based on xRAPM versus actual wins. Hornecek's ranking that high also seems to support this conclusion. Therefore one would expect Brooks, who in his first three years at OKC saw his team draft Durant, WB, Ibaka and Harden would rank highly due to star player development. That in retrospect was a team that was going to improve drastically every year while those players developed. I imagine that Brooks ranking will begin to digress just because any metric used expects OKC to do well these days.

    This ranking actually dovetails nicely with the MIT-Sloan published work on the actual value of a head coach.

    Anyway I may have more to add after I think about it longer.

    [​IMG]
     
    #1 jtr, Feb 23, 2014
    Last edited: Feb 23, 2014
  2. rockbox

    rockbox Around before clutchcity.com

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    I hated Hornacek as a player but he is a hell of a coach. The guy just has the suns playing the right way. I guess I'm not surprised because it seems the best coaches are the ones that were successful NBA players despite their limited physical ability.
     
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  3. ballerboy001

    ballerboy001 Member

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    Where does as p
    Spoelstra fit?
     
  4. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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    Spoelstra actually ranks pretty low. -0.3. However he inherited 3 of the top ranked players in the NBA when he started coaching. The expectations for the Heat have always been a chip. Which again leads me to believe that these rankings are based on expectations versus performance.
     
  5. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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  6. Voice of Aus

    Voice of Aus Contributing Member

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    Hmmm, I'm not a fan of ranking coaches because it is so based on who you front office is, if you have a terrible FO then you will never be able to get a half decent team together, I don't know how you could possibly rank the coach, but I guess it's a cool metric
     
  7. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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    Hope you brought salt to this post. LOL
     
  8. Voice of Aus

    Voice of Aus Contributing Member

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    I think it's more reflective of front office ranking rather than coaches
     
  9. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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    Certainly my first take. But then I put some more thought into the matter and convinced myself that the ranking was based on expectations versus production. This guy publishes xRAPM so he certainly knows his stuff. If the ranking was heavily influenced by FO actions I would have expected McHale to rank lower. And yes I know that McHale was the FO in MIN. I would not have expected JVG to be quite as highly ranked and I would think that Spoelstra would be on top of the rankings by far. But, needless to say, I am basically guessing.
     
  10. Voice of Aus

    Voice of Aus Contributing Member

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    May be hard to question to ask but is it possible to work out Mchales scores when he was in Minnesota vs houston ?
     
  11. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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    Probably not since I have no idea what the underlying algorithms are.
     
  12. thadeus

    thadeus Contributing Member

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  13. roslolian

    roslolian Member

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    Hmm I think putting stats into coaching underrates it, this is why you have dudes like DM saying coaching affects only ~5 wins a season.

    First of all, the caliber of coaching in the NBA is pretty high, except for neophytes like JKidd/Mchale, low budget pickups and a couple of complete jokes (that Sac coach that got arrested for drunk driving) most NBA coaches are lifers who have decades of coaching at a high NBA level, when you're choosing between dudes like Tom Thibs, Rick Adelman, JVG, SVG and George Karl, the X-and-Os level is too similar to compare (again, resulting in the low win difference). Factor in the fact that coaches will only go as far as the roster you give him and using wins/losses metrics IMHO is totally useless, give Phil Jackson the Cavs roster this year and I'm not sure he can do a significantly better job than their current coach.

    IMHO the true value that differentiates coaching is how well they develop players and how much they can get the team to unite and play disciplined ball. You can see this in Popovich and Larry Brown, both guys are praised as having the highest coaching ability but Pops got TD, Parker and Manu to buy into his system so much they took paycuts to play together, while Larry Brown never stayed on a team for long as his abrasive nature burn his teams out and his indifference to rookie development destroys his current team's long-term prospects.
     
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  14. smoothie

    smoothie Jabari Jungle

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    well said. you can't really rank coaches, but i would be a fan of a tier ranking. your list of coaches would be top tier for sure. some coaches are great X's and O's, some motivators who will get the most effort out of his players, some are great at player development. it really depends on what the team needs.

    so if a coach is brought in to develop young players with a lot of potential, and in 3 years he's developed the star player into an all star, a late first round pick into a starter, and a second round pick into a top bench player... but the team has a losing record every year with only slight improvements do to the players getting better, most would just look at him as a bad coach when in fact he did a great job of developing those players.

    he'll be replaced with a great motivator. the young guns will play their hardest and love this coach and make the playoffs, maybe win a series, and he puts them on the map. they attrack some free agents and their talent level raises. but after a few years of first/second round exits, he's also replaced as a coach that can't get it done. however, he did his job by showing the young team how to approach the game professionally, how to be prepared and play hard every night. but he'll also get a bad rap.

    he'll be replaced with a top tier X's and O's guy who knows how to take a young playoff team over the top. in part this coach was attracted to the team based on the accomplishments of the "motivator" coach. so he's here to take the team over the top. not every team wins a championship. he might win, maybe just a finals appearance, maybe just a new conference finals. but this is a team in its prime trying its best. however, this coach doesn't pay any attention to player development. so in a few years the window closes. the roster is blown up, and he's fired... replaced by the talent developer. and the cycle continues.

    if any coach can be successful at any 1 of these 3 areas guarantees him to be an nba head coach. maybe the talent developer will only get 1 or two shots at being a head coach. if any coach can be successful at 2 of these areas, he's a guaranteed head coach and a pretty good one, for his career. the only exception here is the great X's and O's coach doesn't have to be good at anything else and can still be considered a top level coach (hi larry brown).

    when it comes to mchale, i'd say he's got a pretty good track record for player development. he's also a guy that motivates the team to play their best. for that i'd say he actually is a pretty good coach. however, i think he was hired for his player development (before the harden trade and the dwight signing) back when we thought we'd be rebuilding.that and he's willing to be a yes man to advanced stats. i believe he will be around for another year or two while we make a couple of good playoff runs, but if he doesn't get us to the WFC or better he will be replaced with one of the top X's and O's guys to try to get us over the hump. i kind of wish we could've gone after one of those guys this summer when we signed dwight, but dwight signed in part to play for mchale. so maybe he gets this year and next unless we get to the WCF.
     
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  15. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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    A couple of perceptive posts above. I would hesitate to dismiss the MIT-Sloan statistical study, but hey, I am a stats guy.

    But IMHO X's and O's are highly overrated. Statistical studies have shown that team offensive performance actually is significantly diminished after a time out. And it used a massive amount of data. In most situations a team would be much better off not taking a timeout than taking one to draw up a play. But do not underestimate how important timeouts can be to break momentum or get the team a blow.

    Team motivation is IMHO the biggest plus a head coach can bring to the table. Get everyone practicing hard, on the same page offensively and defensively, and playing to win. I cannot see how that can ever be over estimated. Isn't that what Phil "Zen Master" Jackson did so well? He has freely admitted that he was not strong at drawing up plays. But the Triangle took care of that.
     
  16. roslolian

    roslolian Member

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    ^Hmm those are all good points smoothie, I never really thought about it that way. Maybe that's why DM and Les Alexander chose Mchale, as "yes man" he was supposed to be the American Football style coach who would just oversee everything while they got offensive and defensive coordinators who would do the actual coaching. Too bad this is harder to implement in reality than in paper lol.

    With that said, I think a dude like Mchale is more valuable than a guy who has good X-and-O's like Brown, simply because anybody can be proficient at X-and-O's with some seasons of experience while coach star power and personality is something innate. A dude like Shaq was openly derisive of SVG but he would probably respect Mchale more due to his playing cred and ring power even though everybody agrees SVG is much better than Mchale at tactics. In this respect, you can say Mchale has more potential than other coaches since once he learns the X-and-O's he'll be better than SVG. Perhaps when it's time to replace Mchale with an X-and-O's guys as you said he'd have developed the necessary skills to keep his job, I certainly see a marked improvement on his coaching ability this year compared to last.
     
  17. roslolian

    roslolian Member

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    Yes, and also you can hire assistant coaches who can do the actual strategizing for you, nobody said you have to do all the work. IIRC the Boston team that won a ring had Rivers as the figure head/Kumbayah-let's-hold-hands motivator however the one who actually designed and implemented the defense was Tom Thibs.
     
  18. jtr

    jtr Contributing Member

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    Nice posts you two! I have come away with much more understanding after reading your thoughts.
     
  19. rockbox

    rockbox Around before clutchcity.com

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    Where is Carlisle. He has to be up there somewhere.
     
  20. BleedRocketsRed

    BleedRocketsRed Contributing Member

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    1. Popovich
    2. Thibs
    3. Doctor Rivers
    4. Carlilse
    5. Adelman
    6. Vogel
     

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