Pointless Profession? Coaching In NBA Fits Bill Quite Well

[duncan228]

Pointless profession? Coaching in NBA fits bill quite well (http://www.cbssports.com/nba/story/11812726)
By Gregg Doyel
CBSSports.com National Columnist

If coaching mattered in the NBA, and I mean really and truly mattered, ABC would pressure the league to cancel the NBA Finals so the network could show something with more substance and mystery. Like Pros vs. Joes.

Phil vs. Van Gundy?

That's a blowout, if coaching really and truly mattered in the NBA.

The Lakers' Phil Jackson has nine NBA championship rings, and has been called "the greatest coach ever" by former player Shaquille O'Neal. The Magic's Stan Van Gundy has no rings, and according to his most famous former player -- Shaquille O'Neal, actually -- he has no coaching ability either. "A master of panic," O'Neal called him.

Before it starts, this series is over. If coaching mattered in the NBA.

Which it does not.

And understand, this is not an argument you've heard before. Or at least, it's not the argument you've heard before. This isn't the usual, annual, clichéd attack of Phil Jackson's credentials. The man has won nine NBA rings, tied for the league record with Boston's Red Auerbach, and some people don't like it.

Auerbach didn't, for one.

Lots of people don't like it. They say Jackson had Jordan and Pippen in Chicago, and then he had Kobe and Shaq with the Lakers. They say any idiot could have won with Jordan and Pippen, and with Kobe and Shaq. And they're right.

But they're more right than they're willing to admit -- because a loaded roster hasn't made only Jackson a winner. Success in the NBA is more about the players, and less about the coach, than any league, pro or amateur, in U.S. sports. Maybe worldwide sports, but I don't know about cricket, and furthermore, I don't care. Save your cricket e-mails. I won't read them.

If you send an e-mail about the brilliance of Jackson, or Van Gundy, or even Mike Brown or George Karl, sure, I'll read that. But I might giggle, because there is no great coaching in the NBA. There is no great coach, unless it's Mike D'Antoni. He's the only coach today who innovates, who takes good players and makes them great. Look at Steve Nash before D'Antoni, and Steve Nash after D'Antoni: nice player. Look at Steve Nash with D'Antoni: two-time MVP.

Whether you agree or not, frankly, I don't care. Coaches I know, coaches I trust -- college coaches -- believe D'Antoni is the best X-and-O guy in the game. And that's good enough for me.

Phil Jackson? He's not into X's or O's. He's into Zen and motivation. He's into Jack Kerouac. He appears to be very smart, but he's not drawing up squat. The triangle offense that won all those NBA titles? His assistant, Tex Winter, perfected that thing. Jackson installed it, then got the hell out of the way.

And again, please, this is not an attack on the impact of Phil Jackson. This is an attack on the impact of any NBA coach. Doc Rivers was a loser in Orlando and a bust in Boston until he was given Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. The Dallas Mavericks have risen with Dirk Nowitzki, but they've never had the help at center or, minus Nash, at point guard to win an NBA title -- and it hasn't mattered if the coach was Don Nelson or Avery Johnson or Rick Carlisle.

Nobody's asking who made whom great in Boston. Red Auerbach didn't make Russell, Cousy, Havlicek, Sharman and Heinsohn. They made him. There is no chicken-or-egg debate between talent and coaching. I know who came first: David Robinson, Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili came first. Then came Gregg Popovich.

Here's a story that will show you the importance of an NBA head coach:

This season I've watched an NBA coach spend timeouts on the floor, talking with several of his assistant coaches about strategy, or maybe restaurants. On the bench, his players were watching an assistant coach draw up something on a grease board. The timeout ended, and the head coach never once said a word to his team. Not a word.

And this was the Eastern Conference finals.

And that was Cleveland's Mike Brown.

And he's the NBA Coach of the Year.

Phil Jackson does the same thing. He spends timeouts away from his team, letting them ignore each other or bicker among themselves for all but the final 15 seconds. Only when a referee gives the first warning -- meaning, the timeout will end in a few seconds -- does Jackson walk over to his team, utter a sentence or two, and send them on their way.

Jackson is that brilliant? Not really. He's that aware of how little coaching matters in the NBA -- and more to the point, how little an NBA team wants to be coached at all.

This is the only sport where the best coaches are in the college games. In baseball or football, the best minds tend to make their way to the major leagues or NFL. In basketball, the best pure coaches stay in college, where the pure coaching is done.

Don't tell me about the well-known NBA failure of college winners like Mike Montgomery, Lon Kruger, John Calipari and Rick Pitino. That doesn't prove I'm wrong. Hell, that proves I'm right. Coaching in the NBA isn’t about coaching. It's about being friends with your players, motivating them, trusting them to coach themselves -- and a college coach doesn't want to do any of that. A college coach wants to actually coach the damn team, and in the NBA, where several players on each team will make three or four times as much as the coach, they don't want to be told what to do. Why do NBA players rebel against their coach, quit on him, get him fired? Because they can.

Winning NBA coaches have one thing in common: Talented players who like him enough to try on defense. That's why Mike Brown was Coach of the Year this season in Cleveland. He had LeBron James, and everyone on the team liked him enough to hustle on defense. But the 66-win Cavaliers were clearly outclassed in the Eastern Conference finals by the 59-win Magic because the Magic had better talent. And the deeper you go in the playoffs, the more the talent rules.

So Los Angeles will probably win the NBA Finals. Because talent rules. The frontcourts are almost a wash -- small edge, Orlando -- but the Lakers have an enormous advantage in the backcourt, and that'll be that. Kobe Bryant and Co. will win a 10th NBA title for Phil Jackson, a coaching genius who wouldn't last four years at Clemson.

[duncan228]

The other side.

Coaching doesn't matter in NBA? That doesn't add up (http://www.cbssports.com/nba/story/11812721)
By Ken Berger
CBSSports.com Senior Writer

An a-steamed columnist on this site is going to try to explain to you that coaching doesn't matter in the NBA, and won't matter in the Finals, where two of the top coaches in the league will begin matching wits Thursday.

He will tell you the NBA game is all about the players, all about talent, and that no amount of strategy, play-calling, preparation, film study or psychological warfare will make a damn bit of difference to the outcome of the case before this court, Magic v. Lakers.

He might even tell you that NBA players are too lazy to study film, too arrogant to listen to coaches, too distracted by the multi-millionaire party life to bother preparing for their opponent.

I'm here to tell you that Gregg Doyel is nuts.

But then, you knew that already.

Well, I'm here to tell you that Doyel is wrong on this one. Dead wrong.

Coaching matters in the NBA, and it will play a significant role in the outcome of the Magic-Lakers series.

But don't take my word for it. Take Jerry Buss' word for it. Dr. Buss is paying Phil Jackson $10 million a year on the belief that coaching matters. Take Magic chairman Rich DeVos' word for it. He tried to hire Billy Donovan, got jilted and wound up with some gravelly voiced, mustachioed, nervous-jervis genius named Stan Van Gundy. And voilà, his team is in the NBA Finals for the first since it lost to Houston in 1995. Has Doyel already forgotten how the coach of the Magic at that time, Brian Hill, still hasn't lived down the notion that he underachieved with a team that featured a baby-faced Shaquille O'Neal and youthful Penny Hardaway?

It's also worth noting that this same Magic franchise once was coached by the late, great Chuck Daly. To argue that coaching in the NBA doesn't matter is one thing. To do so only a few weeks after the passing of Daly, who revolutionized defensive strategy and the handling of egos -- the two most significant jobs of an NBA coach -- is, quite simply, pure blasphemy.

Doyel, go back under that rock from whence you crawled. I'm not finished yet.

If coaching doesn't matter, then tell me how many coaches have accounted for the past 30 NBA championships. (I got bored after 30 and stopped there, so I didn't get to Holzman or Auerbach). The answer is 12, and here they are: Doc Rivers, Gregg Popovich, Pat Riley, Larry Brown, Phil Jackson, Rudy Tomjanovich, Chuck Daly, K.C. Jones, Billy Cunningham, Lenny Wilkens, Paul Westhead and Bill Fitch.

The past 21 NBA titles have been won by seven coaches. The 62 NBA titles have been won by 28 coaches. To the notion that all those coaches got lucky -- or that you, me or Doyel could coach a talented team to an NBA championship -- I say, "My baloney has a first name, it's G-R-E-G-G ..."

Now for this series, Magic vs. Lakers. Coaching will matter. Here's why:

With few exceptions, NBA postseason games are so close that they often come down to a single play, or a single exchange of possessions at the end of the game. They also come down to substitutions, matchups, inbounds plays (Hell-oooooo Denver Nuggets), defensive stops, rebounds or clutch shots. In the case of clutch shots, whether it's Kobe Bryant, Hedo Turkoglu or Rashard Lewis, it will come down to the breathtaking talent of the player involved performing through the prism of preparation and coaching that got him to that moment. (Ditto for the player defending him.)

It's easy to assume that Jackson has won nine championships because he had great players -- Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal and Bryant. But the undeniable strength of his championship teams has been their ability to size up an opponent during the course of a best-of-7 series, diagnose its strengths and weaknesses, and exploit its tendencies as the series goes on. This is called coaching, and it's exactly what happened in the conference semifinals against Denver. In Game 5, Jackson's renowned triangle offense reached a tipping point when the players finally figured out how, where and when to attack. From that point, it was over.

Van Gundy has been derided for his panicky personality, his pessimism, and his inability to keep his star player (in this case, Howard) happy. He probably would admit that this postseason has challenged him to adapt and change as a coach more than he thought possible. His superstar is happy, and Orlando is on the verge of its first championship. Win or lose against the Lakers, Van Gundy deserves credit for that.

But again, don't take my word for it. Listen to a Western Conference GM who pointed out that one of the biggest factors in this series will have nothing to do with talent. It will have to do with how Jackson and his coaching staff tactically adjust their defensive scheme to defend the 3-point line better than Cleveland did in the conference finals.

"Cleveland is very rigid as far as defensive rotations," the GM said. "Phil is a lot more flexible. That flexibility will allow the Lakers to use their length and defend the 3-point line better than Cleveland did."

And it all goes back to the question of whether you double-team Howard in the post or play him one-on-one and stay with the shooters. Teams like Cleveland, San Antonio and Boston are loyal to a rotation scheme that dictates doubling the post scorer and rotating to the shooters. You can't be stubborn that way against Orlando if you're going to solve that conundrum. Jackson is stubborn about some things, but solving conundrums is his specialty. If his previous championship teams are any indication, it might take the Lakers three, four or five games to figure it out. But they will figure it out.

So sometimes it comes down to coaching philosophy and the coach's willingness to adapt and change -- from series to series, within a series and within a game. If Mike Brown had been more adaptable and less stubborn, the NBA might've had its Kobe vs. LeBron matchup, after all. Don't believe me? Read this quote from the Cavs' Wally Szczerbiak after the Cavs lost to Orlando: "They had a dominant big man, they were knocking down 3s all over the floor, and they had our heads spinning in rotations the whole entire time."

That's coaching, Dr. Doyel. Now we know why LeBron stormed off without speaking to the media after Game 6 was over.

According to another Western Conference executive, Van Gundy might be superior to Jackson in areas such as time and clock management. But Van Gundy has issues to deal with, too. How effectively he deals with them will go a long way toward determining Orlando's chances of winning.

"I think Stan's a very good coach," the exec said. "But I think when he's in a pressured situation, he tends to micromanage. And I think that's a danger with Orlando. Stan can also be a worrywart and very negative, and that can be a challenge. ... I know Dwight Howard is terrific, but the team is better when they play outside-in. If they lose a game, how is Dwight going to respond to that? How many shots is he getting? There's more chance for Orlando to combust."

As far as who is most likely to spontaneously combust before the series even begins, my money is on Doyel -- once he reads this thrashing I've just hung on him.

[mavs>spurs2]

Coaching matters a ton. I don't even have the time to break down every little reason why. How can anyone be dumb enough to buy this crap? Knowing what plays to run and when, and what to throw at a team defensively to disrupt their flow is all very important. It just doesn't show up because we don't get to see the flipside of what WOULD have played out if the coach didn't make the call.

[monosylab1k]

Coaching matters more in lower levels of competition, like HS and NCAA. In the NBA, where superstars rule, coaching isn't as big a deal. That's the only explanation at to how Mike Brown managed to coach a team to 66 wins.

[DUNCANownsKOBE2]

Coaching is overrated. I still find it funny that everyone thought firing Porter and bringing in Gentry would turn the Suns into the Showtime Lakers.

[resistanze]

Apparently being a sports journalist often doesn't require any real ability either.

[JamStone]

I think the quality of coaching generally only matters on bad teams. Or if you're talking about match-ups, coaching matters when two teams are evenly matched.

I think decent coaching is fine if there's great talent. Coaching really only proves to be noteworthy when it's really, really, really bad coaching. I think it's more likely that more than half the NBA coaches could have won titles with the Jordan Bulls or the Shaq-Kobe Lakers than it is likely that Phil Jackson could turn around the LA Clippers or the Knicks into title contenders with the same personnel they've had.

It's not that coaching doesn't matter at all. But, I'd take average coaching with great talent over brilliant coaching with poor talent. It's still a player's league.