THIS is probably Jason Kidd’s greatest contribution to the coaching profession: his attempt to get another timeout by having one of his players deliberately run into him and then spilling his soda all over the floor. Kidd was fined $50,000 for this bit of bad acting, having apparently forgotten that there are more cameras in your typical NBA arena than there are in your typical casino, and they cameras caught him gesturing for one of his players to hit him. Points for creativity, however.
Jason Kidd was fired on Monday as head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. This is, as far as the NBA goes, one of the least surprising developments in a topsy-turvy season. The Bucks have Giannis on their team, one of the five best players on the planet, and after acquiring the disgruntled Eric Bledsoe from Phoenix, the Bucks have enough talent that they should legitimately be challenging for the #2 seed in the East. They have more talent than Toronto, than Washington, and should be soaring. Instead, they went into Monday’s action with a 23-22 record and sitting in 8th place in the East – which would be potentially terrifying were they to finish that way, since God knows that the Celtics, nor anyone else, would want to see Giannis in the first round of the playoffs, but Milwaukee ranks as one of the league’s biggest underachievements so far this season. The Bucks should be better than this. Sure, they’ve had some bad injury luck the past two seasons, losing Jabari Parker and Khris Middleton for extended periods of time, but the fact is that the team has too much talent, the team is too expensive, and the owners are too impatient for them to be muddling around at the .500 mark. Their trademark rangy, pressing defense has been figured out this season, like most gimmicks in the NBA eventually are, so the Bucks aren’t stopping anyone, and the offense consists basically of a play called “Giannis Make Stuff Up,” which actually works a surprising amount of the time. As Warriors blog Golden State of Mind rightly points out, you see a lot of similarities between the Bucks and the pre-Steve Kerr era Warriors: an extremely talented team being held back by a coaching staff’s simpleton, if not downright pre-historic schemes.
Kidd’s response to being fired was to do what he has done countless times before, which is to burn all of his bridges in an attempt to make himself look favorable. He promptly did an interview with ESPN and spun a sob story in which he portrayed himself as a victim. This is what Jason Kidd does. No matter when he changes/leaves schools, he changes teams, he changes head coaching jobs, he always makes it a point to go scorched earth and destroy whatever good will he may have had with the previous organization. Everyone was quick to point out how “upset” Giannis was with Kidd’s firing, and I have no doubt that was true, but guess what? Giannis will get over it. This is the NBA, and the NBA is a business. Giannis will get over it about the time they are winning all of the games – which will happen, in part, because whomever replaces Kidd will know actually what he is doing.
Coaches are hired to be fired. January always features the annual NFL bloodletting, where as much as a quarter of the league’s head coaches get canned. And if you think it’s bad here in the States, look at some of the soccer leagues in Europe. We’re up to eight managerial changes in the 20-team Premier League already – the 8th coming on Monday at Watford – and there are still three months of the season left. It can be hard to differentiate, of course, between a coach being bad and his team being bad. If you don’t have any talent, firing guys on the sidelines seems more like a mercy kill than anything else. Amazingly, the NBA went through the entire 2016-2017 season without a single coaching change. Every team seemed like they kind of had an idea of where they were – if you were in the lottery, or the playoffs, it was because of what was on the floor and not on the sidelines. Owners of bad teams, or underachieving teams, showed remarkable patience and restraint.
No longer. Kidd is the third NBA coach fired this season, after Earl Watson in Phoenix and David Fizdale in Memphis – the former being inarguable, the latter being outrageous. I suspect that Kidd won’t be the last. Monday night NBA League Pass is must-see viewing these days, and some serious tactical incompetence was on display all over the place. On the same day that Jason Kidd was being fired by the underachieving Bucks, the underachieving Buzzards from the nation’s capital were getting blown out by Dallas, the Pelicans were contriving to somehow almost get beat at home by the Chicago Bulls, and the Denver Nuggets were actually trying to play ace center Nicola Jokic at the four beside Miles Plumlee – and literally any NBA lineup that involves playing your best player out of position for the benefit of a Plumlee brother is a terrible idea and, quite possibly, a fireable offense. Not surprisingly, the Wiz, Pelicans, and Nuggets are all underachieving. Also not surprisingly, their coaches – Scott Brooks, Alvin Gentry, and Mike Malone – should probably feel their seats getting a little bit warm. All three of those teams should be better. New Orleans has, arguably, two of the 15 best players in the NBA in Boogie and AD. Washington has, inarguably, the second-best backcourt in the league in Wall and Beal. Denver seems to have about 27 guys who you think, “you know, they aren’t that bad.” But every time I watch those teams, I see a muddled mess. (Though to be fair here, the Pelicans have been playing somewhat better of late. They did just beat Boston on the road not to long ago ... oh, wait, then they lost to the Hawks. Never mind ...)
But a good question to ask here is this: how much does a good coach actually add? The NBA is a players’ league. All pro sports are players’ leagues. You’d think a coach’s job in the NBA, or the NFL or Premier League or whatnot, is mostly to play the role of psychologist and “man manager,” as the Brits say. I don’t think Ty Lue is a particularly great Xs-and-Os guy in Cleveland, but he has always done a pretty good job of keeping the peace amid the Cavs’ multitude of egos, which counts for a lot. But does a good coach or manager really make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things? I know that in the overly sabermetrically obsessed world of baseball, they’ve attempted to quantify the effect a manager has on a baseball team, and concluded that a good manager nets about 1.0 wins during a 162-game season – so, in other words, not much of a difference.
And I’m not saying that I dispute those numbers, but in the case of the NBA, I’m watching teams like the Bucks and the Wizards and the Nuggets, all of whom have plenty of talent, flail about and lose a whole shittonne of games that they should win – most galling being the Wiz, who have been flirting with a seemingly impossible stat all year of having a winning record versus teams over .500 and a losing record against teams below .500 – and then I flip over to NBA TV and I watch the Miami Heat, who are presently 4th in the East, playing the Houston Rockets.
Every time I watch the Heat, I am amazed they win any games at all. I see them play and I think, “this team stinks.” But here we were on Monday night, with the Heat missing its best player, Goran Dragic, going down to the wire in Houston in a game they had no business being in at all. I love me some Spo. Erik Spoelstra is a true witch doctor and, in my opinion, the best day-to-day coach in the NBA for continuing to get the most out of what is a roster with 30-win talent. I love me some Spo anyway, knowing that he was there at the Gersten Pavilion in Los Angeles in 1990 on what was the worst day in the history of college basketball and wanting everyone involved in that event to succeed forever. But Jesus, that team overachieves. They play their asses off, they are disciplined and stick to a game plan, they play as a team and they are now winning. A lot. The Miami Heat are currently in 4th place in the East, ahead of bumbling bozos like Washington and Milwaukee, and doing so with a roster of guys who – other than maybe Dragic – no one in the NBA would actually want. And that, right there, is good coaching. That is great coaching, in fact. Unlike a lot of the lesser franchises in the NBA, who don’t seem to care much whether or not they win any games, the edict in Miami is clear: win games, damn it, and no one cares how you do it. The Heat win games. Spo puts his guys in the best positions to win, and quite often, they do so.
Spo does more with less in Miami. That’s good coaching to me, but there is no real metric or stat to quantify it. Miami does more with less, Boston’s done more with less in recent years, Portland and Memphis have done more with less – which is why Fiz being fired in Memphis was outrageous. But this is all eye-test stuff. If we had some better way to gauge it, we’d probably have fewer bad hires.
And hiring a bad coach winds up being an albatross, since you’re on the hook for the guy’s contract if and when it doesn’t pan out. We recently saw one of the most preposterous hirings in the history of sports when Jon Gruden was coaxed out of the ESPN broadcast booth by a 10-year, $100 million contract to coach the moribund Oakland Raiders. Do we want to take any bets on how much dead money is going to be left on Oakland’s books? Sure, Gruden won a Super Bowl in Tampa (and all these years later, saying the “Super Bowl Champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers” sounds weird to me), but how many coaches last 10 years in a job? Only the best of the best stay in a position for that long. Ultimately, coaches are hired to be fired. You hope it doesn’t go that way, but it usually does. Some teams have wound up owing back salary to two and even three ex-coaches, which is a needless drain on your resources. You have to get this hire right, and do it at the right price.
Great coaching is definitely a plus, but where do you find it? The Boston Celtics hit a home run when they hired Brad Stevens, who is fantastic. I was utterly shocked, earlier this year, when the Celtics beat the Houston Rockets because Stevens flat-out coached them to a win: down three late in the game, he designed an in-bounds play to get Jayson Tatum a lay-up, but designed it in such a way that he’d screened and switched all of his guys on his floor onto their best defensive assignments and into positions where they could best defend the inbounds pass, at which point they did so and drew an offensive foul and went on to win a game. It was pure genius, the likes of which you scarcely see in high-level competition. Stevens has proven to be one of the best in the business – and before he was in the NBA, he was coaching at Butler – a nice university gig, a place he built into a national power, but not necessary where you would think to go looking for the next basketball mastermind. It was an inspired hire by Danny Ainge, but not a sure thing by any means.
But a lot of the greats seem to come from nowhere. Gregg Popovich was coaching at Division III Pomona-Pitzer before he jumped to the Spurs. Steve Kerr was a TV analyst, and a great number of people here in Bay Area hated the fact that he had been hired. It’s mysterious and shrouded in intrigue, the coaching search. You have no idea at all who is going to be any good. Maybe you can take a guess and say that a head guy who has his shit together must have underlings who have their shit together as well, and you should hire off his staff. It pleases me to say that three current NBA coaches were on staff with George Karl for the Seattle SuperSonics in the 1990s – Terry Stotts in Portland, Duane Casey in Portland, and Thibs in Minnesota. But then you look at the NFL, where Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll have had their staffs raided for years now, and none of those guys succeed in the top job. (Not that this stops folks from trying, as the Pats are primed to lose both their offensive and defensive coordinators this offseason to Indianapolis and Detroit, respectively.) Great coaching is really hard to find. It’s hard to quantify and it’s even harder to identify. It’s one of those things that you know you need, but don’t necessarily know why you need it, much less know where to get it.
The tendency in this situation, of course, is to be risk averse and go for the proverbial “safe pair of hands,” some retread who has coached before and been around the league. It may be a safe choice, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Most guys end out of coaching for one reason, and one reason only: they don’t win enough. And speaking of retreads, and speaking of the broadcast booth, almost immediately the two lead analysts on the ABC/ESPN broadcast team – Marc Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy – have been floated as possible candidates for the job in Milwaukee. As for the former, well, I already mentioned how the Bucks mirrors what it was like in the pre-Kerr Warrior days … back when they were coached by Jackson, who also did a whole lot of behind-the-scenes shit at Golden State the likes of which will possibly keep him from ever landed a head job again. As for the latter, well, after his 5-minute rant about the lack of respect for officials by the players during the Golden State-Houston game on Saturday, I’m in favor of him getting a new job so that I never have to listen to him again. (Jeez, Jeff, if you were a coach and your team was getting outshot 16-4 at the foul line and their starting center was averaging 4.7 steps every time he caught the ball, something tells me you wouldn’t be so gracious to the officials, either.) Van Gundy is well-regarded by Milwaukee’s owners, who are New York guys who remember when JVG coached the Knicks, but that was, like, forever ago. Seriously, can’t we have a little more imagination here?
The Bucks have said they’ll interim the gig for the rest of the season and then do a full search this summer – which is smart, because it’s likely to be the best job on the market and they should be diligent in a search. Who wouldn’t want to coach this roster? Who wouldn’t want this job? Fizdale seems like a no-brainer, if he wants it, but the Bucks brass need to get out and look around. You have a great young core, a new arena opening, and this should be the salad days. Fear the Deer. But it’s also an expensive roster, they have very little flexibility, and they also have a history of in-house dysfunctionality. They have to get this one right. The Deer have reason to fear.
