Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today we are leaving
the court. We're walking past the scorer's table,
stepping over that imaginary line, and taking
a seat on the bench. Or maybe not even the bench.
We're standing in that little box, that high
-pressure rectangle right in front of the bench.
Exactly. We aren't talking about the guys with
the signature shoes today. We're talking about
the architects, the people in the, well, the
expensive suits, or the... Team branded quarter
zips, depending on the era. Right. The ones losing
sleep, going gray, screaming until they lose
their voices so that we can all enjoy the highlights
on TV. We are doing a deep dive into the NBA
Coach of the Year Award. And it is, I think,
the most fascinating and honestly the most paradoxical
award in all of professional sports. How so?
Paradoxical in what way? Well, think about it.
You can count points. You can track shooting
percentages, rebounds per game. Those are all
hard numbers. They're objective. But how do you
quantify leadership? How do you possibly put
a number on managing a locker room full of, you
know, multimillionaire egos? Or on the decision
to call a specific timeout with 1 .8 seconds
left that changes an entire season? You can't.
And that's really the mission today, isn't it?
We're going to try to quantify the unquantifiable.
And we're doing this from our vantage point here
in early 2026, looking back at the whole history
of this award, including the most recent winner.
Yep, the 2024 -25 season winner, Kenny Atkinson
of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Which is a great
place to set the stage. Because Atkinson really
represents one very specific flavor of this award.
Oh, absolutely. Leading the Cavs to a 64 -18
record. I mean, that is no small feat. That fits
the classic profile of what I'd call dominance.
Dominance. It's about taking a roster that's
already talented and just maximizing its potential
to an extreme degree. But as we're going to find
out, dominance isn't the only way to win this
trophy. Sometimes it's not even the best way.
64 wins is a juggernaut season, no question.
But before we break down the winners, the weirdos,
and the absolute legends of this award, we need
to look at the prize itself, the physical object.
The Red Auerbach Trophy. The Red Auerbach Trophy.
Now, if you're a casual fan, you know the name
Celtics. You probably know the name Red. And
you definitely visualize a cigar. The Victory
Cigar, of course. But I feel like the modern
fan might not totally grasp why this. What specific
man is the standard bearer for the entire profession?
I mean, why is his name on the hardware? You
absolutely cannot tell the story of the NBA without
Red Auerbach. He's a patriarch. He is the blueprint.
That's a strong statement. It is. We're talking
about the man who built the Boston Celtics dynasty.
Between 1956 and 1966, he led that team to nine
NBA championships. Say that again. Nine. Nine
titles in 10 years. That is actually absurd.
In modern sports, we talk about a dynasty. If
a team wins, what, two in three years? Maybe
three in five. Nine in 10 sounds like a typo.
It does, doesn't it? It suggests a level of monopoly
on winning that is just. It's impossible today.
But Red wasn't just about winning. He was about
control. He invented the modern archetype of
the NBA coach. What do you mean by that? The
psychological warfare with other teams, the,
you know, the constant manipulation of the referees,
lighting up those victory cigars on the bench
before the game was even technically over. Just
total alpha dog stuff. And he won this specific
award himself, right? He did in the 1964 -65
season. So when a coach like Kenny Atkinson lifts
that trophy today, they are holding. a piece
of history that represents the absolute apex
of the job. It's named after the guy who basically
invented the job as we know it. It sets a pretty
high bar. So if red is the gold standard, how
on earth do we decide who meets that standard
every year? Because when I was going through
our source material, the criteria seemed, well,
slippery. That's a good word for it. It's not
like the scoring title where you just do the
math and you have a winner. Who is actually making
this call? It is entirely subjective. And that's
where the fun and the controversy usually starts.
The voting body is made up of a panel of sports
writers and broadcasters from across the United
States and Canada. So the media. The media. The
beat writers, the national columnists, the people
who are watching the league day in and day out.
They're the ones who are constructing the narrative
of the season. And they aren't just picking one
name off a list, are they? It's a weighted system.
Correct. It works very similarly to the MVP voting.
Each voter casts a ballot for first, second,
and third place. And the points are? A first
place vote is worth five points, second is worth
three points, and third place gets you one point.
You tally it all up, and the coach with the highest
score wins. This is interesting because it introduces
a kind of strategic element or at least a mathematical
quirk. I mean, theoretically, you could have
a coach who is very polarizing, right? Maybe
half the voters think he's a genius. The other
half think he just has good players. So he might
get a lot of first place votes but be left off
other ballots entirely. While a safer pick, who
everyone agrees did a pretty good job, could
rack up a ton of second and third place votes
and sneak out a win. Has that ever happened?
It is mathematically possible, though, to be
fair. Historically, the person with the most
first place votes usually does end up winning.
But the real friction, the real debate comes
from the official definition of the award. Let's
hear it. The award is given to the coach deemed,
and I'm quoting the source material here, most
integral to their team's success in the regular
season. OK. Integral to success. That is a phrase
that is doing a massive amount of heavy lifting.
A truly heroic amount. Because success as a concept
means completely different things to different
franchises. Right. And this is the key to understanding
this whole deep dive today. For a team like,
say, the Boston Celtics or the Lakers, success
might mean 60 wins and a number one seed. Anything
less is a failure. Absolutely. But for a team
like, I don't know, the Orlando Magic or the
Utah Jazz in a rebuilding year, success might
be winning 42 games and just sneaking into the
playoffs when everyone, all the experts, predicted
they'd only win 20. So the award creates the
sliding scale. It almost feels like it rewards
the overachiever more often than the dominator.
That is the most common narrative we see year
after year. We call it the expectation gap. The
award often goes to the coach who defied the
preseason betting odds the most. It's a story
award. It's a story award. If you were supposed
to be bad and you turned out to be decent, you
are a genius. If you were supposed to be great
and you were just great, well, you just did your
job. The voters love a story of redemption, a
story of surprise. That seems a little unfair
to the coaches of the super teams, doesn't it?
I mean, managing superstars is a job in itself.
Keeping three guys who all think they should
be the MVP happy and playing together, that's
an art form. It is, and we will definitely get
to that tension later on. But for now, let's
look at the history. The awards started in the
1962 -63 season. Harry Gallatin of the St. Louis
Hawks, first winner. That's him. And since then,
we have had 31 distinct winners. That's a lot
of turnover. It really reflects the volatility
of the job, I think. Yeah. Coaching in the NBA
is not exactly a job with high security. Not
at all. But within that list of 41 names, there
are the Titans, the select few who managed to
win it not once, not twice. But three times.
The Mount Rushmore of the sidelines. It's a very,
very short list. Only three men have done it.
And I want to break them down because they seem
to represent three totally different styles of
coaching greatness. They really do. First up,
we have Don Nelson. Nelly, the mad scientist.
He won it twice with the Milwaukee Bucks in the
80s. That's 1983 and 1985. And then again with
the Golden State Warriors in 1992. Right. When
people hear Don Nelson, especially modern fans,
they usually think of that Warriors era. Run
TMC. Can you explain what that was for the listener
who might just see it as, you know, a retro t
-shirt design? Run TMC stood for Tim Hardaway,
Mitch Richmond, and Chris Mullen. It was a play
on the rap group Run DMC, of course. But on the
court, it was. It was revolutionary. In what
way? Well, Nelson looked at his roster and he
realized he didn't have a dominant big man. This
was an era where you had to have a Patrick Ewing
or a Hakeem Olajuwon to win. You just did. It
was the law of the land. It was. So Nelly decided
to just flip the script entirely. He decided
to just outrun everyone. He played what came
to be known as... Nelly ball. It meant playing
with small lineups, a frenetic pace, constantly
creating mismatches, and shooting really early
in the shot clock. He was essentially playing
a modern style of basketball 30 years before
the rest of the league caught up. So his wins
were for innovation. He changed the geometry
of the game. Exactly. He proved that you could
win without following the traditional unwritten
rules of basketball. His third win in 92 really
validated that entire style. He wasn't just managing
talent. He was inventing a new way to play the
game. He was integral to success because his
system was this success. Without his brain, that
specific roster just doesn't work. Okay, so Nelson
is the innovator. The next three -time winner
is Pat Riley. To me, he feels more like the motivator
or maybe the cult of personality. Pat Riley is
fascinating because he holds a distinction that
nobody else has. Not Red Auerbach, not Phil Jackson,
nobody. He is the only coach to win the award
with three different franchises. Three different
teams. That suggests a level of adaptability,
that is. Well, it's pretty rare. Usually a coach
has a system, right? And if the players fit that
system, great. If not, the coach gets fired.
But Riley. Riley didn't have a system. He had
a standard. And he could apply that standard
anywhere. Yeah. Look at the timeline. He wins
in 1990 with the Los Angeles Lakers. Showtime.
The tail end of Showtime. Yeah. Magic Johnson.
Fast breaks. Glitz. Glamour. The Armani suits
on the sideline. It was Hollywood basketball.
It was all about finesse and speed. And then
he goes to New York. And he wins it again in
1993 with the New York Knicks. That Knicks team
was the polar opposite of the Lakers. They were
arguably the most physical, bruising, defensive
-minded team in the entire league. The bad boys
of New York. Totally. They didn't run past you.
They went through you. They would knock you down
and stare you down. He completely traded the
finesse for the fight. He went from a Hollywood
movie to a street fight. Yeah. And then there
was a third act. 1997 with the Miami Heat. He
goes down to Florida. and builds a culture from
absolute scratch. He brings that discipline,
that heat culture we still talk about today.
The hardest working, best conditioned, most professional,
unselfish, toughest, meanest, nastiest team in
the NBA. That was his mantra. And it proves what
exactly? It proves he wasn't a product of his
players. He was the catalyst. He could coach
any style from Showtime to grind it out as long
as the end result was winning. So we have the
innovator in Nelson, the chameleon in Riley,
and then the third Titan. Greg Popovich. Pop.
The model of consistency. The G .O. to many people.
And he won all three of his awards, 2003, 2012,
and 2014, with the same team. The San Antonio
Spurs. All of them. Which is an achievement in
longevity alone. In the modern NBA, staying with
one team for 20 -plus years is basically unheard
of. Coaches usually have a shelf life of, what,
three or four years before the message gets stale
and the players just tune them out. Popovich
is unique. He built an entire ecosystem in San
Antonio. that allowed him to evolve as the game
evolved. But there's a correlation with him that
separates him from the others we just mentioned.
Really important one. Popovich is the only recipient
to win the Coach of the Year award and the NBA
championship in the same season twice. Wait,
hold on. Let's pause on that. You're saying he
did it twice. The way you phrase that implies
that usually the Coach of the Year doesn't win
the championship. You have hit the nail directly
on the head. That brings us to what's known as
the curse. or at least the major, major disconnect
between this award and the actual goal of the
sport, which is winning a title. I was shocked
by the stat when I was going through the research.
You would just assume that the coach of the year
is the guy holding the Larry O 'Brien trophy
at the parade, but you're saying that is almost
never the case. The data is just staggering.
Since the award began way back in 1963, only
five coaches have won the coach of the year and
the championship in the same season. Five. That's
it. In over 60 years of this award. That seems
statistically impossible if the award is actually
identifying the best coach in the league. Just
five. It's such an exclusive club, we should
probably list them. Please do. You have Red Auerbach,
of course, in 1965. You have Red Holzman with
the Knicks in 1970. Bill Sharman with the Lakers
in 1972. Okay. Then there's a massive drought.
Nobody does it for 24 years. 24 years. Until
Phil Jackson with the 72 -win Bulls in 1996.
And finally, Greg Popagich, who did it twice
in 03 and 14. That's the entire list. So statistically
speaking, if your team's coach is named Coach
of the Year in April, you should probably be
a little worried about your playoff chances in
May. It is almost a bad omen. But it makes perfect
sense when you think back to the criteria we
discussed earlier. The overachiever narrative.
Exactly. The award is for the regular season.
It's voted on before the playoffs even conclude.
It rewards the team that surprised everyone.
But championship teams usually aren't overachievers.
They're dominant veteran teams who often cruise
a bit through the regular season to save their
energy for the real fight in the playoffs. That's
a great point. The team that wins 65 games might
be kind of boring. The story isn't as good. The
team that wins 48 games when they were projected
for 30, that's a fantastic story. But the 48
-win team usually gets crushed in the second
round of the playoffs because, at the end of
the day, talent wins out in a seven -game series.
The award rewards the journey. The championship
rewards the destination. Perfectly said. The
voters are seduced by the narrative of the turnaround.
The playoffs, however, are about raw talent and
matchups, not nice stories. There's another sort
of unwritten rule that seems to plague this award.
The no repeats rule. It's one of the hardest
facts to believe, but it's true. No coach has
ever won consecutive Coach of the Year awards.
Not once in league history. That can't be right.
I mean, surely Phil Jackson had two great years
in a row. Or Steve Kerr with the Warriors. Or
Popovich. Or Eric Spolstra in Miami. They all
had great years. Historic years, even. But they
never, ever. won the award back to back. Why?
Why does that happen? Is it just voter fatigue?
It's what I call the hedonic treadmill of expectations.
Yeah. Let's say you take a really bad team and
you win 50 games. You win coach of the year.
Amazing job. Right. The next season, everyone
expects you to be good. So if you win 55 games,
the voters just shrug. They say, well, you're
supposed to do that now. You've raised your own
bar too high for them. So to win it again, you
would practically have to go 82 -0 or something.
Precisely. Unless you make another historic leap
like going from 50 wins to 73 wins, you are not
getting that trophy two years in a row. Once
you're established as great, greatness becomes
the new baseline. It becomes boring. The voters
start looking for the new surprise story. You
become a victim of your own success. Consistency
is boring to the voters. That actually explains
so much about this award. It really does. Speaking
of historic leaps and weird stats, I want to
move to the section of the deep dive I like to
call the anomalies. These are the winners that
make you look at the Wikipedia page and say,
wait, is that a typo? There are some wild ones.
This is where the internal logic of the award
really gets stretched to its limits. Let's start
with the basic idea that you have to be a winner,
you know, have a winning record to be coach of
the year. Apparently that is not true. Not always,
no. We have to go back to the 1966 -67 season.
The winner was a man named Johnny Kerr. Johnny
Kerr. And his record that season, 33 wins and
48 losses. He was 15 games under .500. In any
modern context, a coach going 33 -48 is probably,
you know... cleaning out his office at the end
of the season. He is certainly not writing an
acceptance speech for a major award. How on earth
did he win? Context. It's all about the context.
Johnny Kerr was coaching the Chicago Bulls. But
this was the Bulls' inaugural season. They were
an expansion team. Ah, okay. That's the key.
And for those who don't follow the business side
of the league, expansion teams are usually designed
to fail, right? at least in their first year.
Historically, they are doormats. The expansion
draft gives you all the players that the other
teams didn't want to protect. You get aging veterans,
guys with bad knees, rookies who aren't quite
ready. You're expected to win 10, maybe 15 games.
You are cannon fodder for the real teams. So
Kerr taking a group of castoffs and winning 33
games. And making the playoffs. That's the other
crucial part. He dragged an expansion team, a
team that didn't exist the year before, into
the postseason in year one. OK, so in that context,
the 33 wins felt like 60 wins because the expectation
was literally zero. Exactly. The voters recognized
that he was squeezing water from a stone. It
set this incredible precedent that the award
is about the job done relative to the resources
available. He overperformed the model by such
a huge margin that the actual losing record didn't
matter at all. So that explains winning with
a losing record. But what about the inverse?
Winning the award with a mediocre record and
missing the playoffs entirely, is that possible?
It has happened exactly once. The Doc Rivers
game. The 1999 -2000 season with the Orlando
Magic. This is the famous heart and hustle team.
I remember this. This was a whole thing. It was.
Doc Rivers coached that team to a 41 -41 record.
A perfect .500. And his team did not qualify
for the postseason. He is the only person. to
ever win coach of the year without making the
playoffs. How does that happen? We just said
Johnny Kerr won because he made the playoffs.
Doc missed them. What's the logic? Again, we
have to look at the roster and the front office
strategy. The Orlando Magic that year had completely
and intentionally cleared their books. They traded
away all their stars. Penny Hardaway was gone.
They were hoarding salary cap space to make a
huge run at free agents like Tim Duncan and Grant
Hill the following summer. So the roster they
put on the floor that year was... It was essentially
a G League team before the G League really existed.
The main guys were Daryl Armstrong, Bo Outlaw,
a very young Ben Wallace, before he was Ben Wallace.
These were guys who were undrafted, journeymen,
guys fighting for 10 -day contracts just to stay
in the league. They were supposed to be tanking.
They were projected by some magazines to be the
worst team in NBA history. People honestly thought
they might win 10 games. The organization probably
wanted them to lose to get a high draft pick.
And Doc Rivers messed it all up by winning half
his games. He had them playing with just unbelievable
intensity. They pressed full court. They scrapped
for everything. They dove for every loose ball.
They shocked everyone and finished at .500. And
they only missed the eighth seed on a tiebreaker.
So the voters looked at a .500 record and decided
that was a more impressive coaching feat than,
say, Phil Jackson winning 67 games with Shaquille
O 'Neal and Kobe Bryant that exact same year.
Yes. And frankly, it's hard to argue with them.
Taking a Ferrari to the finish line is one thing.
That's what Phil Jackson did. But taking a bicycle
with a flat tire and somehow keeping up with
the Ferraris for 82 games, that is something
else entirely. It solidified Doc Rivers' reputation
for decades to come. I love that. It really frames
coaching as a resource management game. But if
we're talking about weird anomalies, we have
to, we just have to talk about the 2015 -16 Golden
State Warriors. Ah, the controversy. The asterisk
season. This whole situation gives me a headache
just thinking about it. Okay, let's set the scene
for everyone. It is the 2015 -16 season. The
Warriors are coming off a championship. They
are an absolute machine. They go on to win 73
games, breaking the all -time regular season
record set by the 96 Bulls. So Steve Kerr is
the head coach. He wins coach of the year. On
paper, this is the most obvious slam dunk award
in the history of sports. Best record ever. You
get the award. Simple. But. But. Steve Kerr wasn't
there for most of it. He missed the first 43
games of the season due to complications from
back surgery. That is more than half the season.
He was gone. So who was coaching the team? His
lead assistant, Luke Walton. He stepped in as
the interim head coach. And how did the team
do under Walton, the interim coach? They started
the season 24 -0. 24 -0. It was the best start
in NBA history. They were just destroying the
entire league. Okay, so just to be clear, Luke
Walton is standing on the sideline. He's calling
the timeouts. He's managing the rotations for
a team that goes on a historic 24 -0 run to start
the season. But Steve Kerr gets the trophy. This
is where the NBA rulebook gets very, very rigid.
The league has a policy. Wins and losses are
officially credited to the head coach of record.
even if he is not physically present. That seems
insane. They do not credit interim coaches with
win -loss records unless the head coach is actually
fired or resigns. Since Kerr was just on medical
leave, every single win that Luke Walton presided
over was officially added to Steve Kerr's permanent
record. So the voters must have revolted, right?
They were confused. And it showed up on the ballot.
Luke Walton actually received votes for coach
of the year. He got one second place vote and
two third place votes, which technically shouldn't
even have been allowed because he wasn't officially
a head coach. I love that. That's a silent protest
by the sports writers. They're basically saying,
we know what we saw. It gets even funnier. The
NBA Awards Coach of the Month honors throughout
the season, right? In October, November of that
season, the Western Conference Coach of the Month
was Luke Walton. You're kidding me. So Luke Walton
was the official coach of the month, but Steve
Kerr was the coach of the year, based largely
on the months that Walton coached. That is exactly
what happened. Steve Kerr even tried to get the
league to change it. He publicly said, I didn't
coach those games. Luke did. The record should
be his. But the NBA said, no, rules are rules.
So what's the big takeaway from that whole mess?
Aside from the fact that the NBA loves its bureaucracy.
I think it highlights two things. One, the weirdness
of the rules, obviously. But two. And maybe more
importantly, it speaks to the power of a system.
Steve Kerr had built such a strong culture and
such a potent offensive system that the team
could essentially run itself or run with a substitute
teacher and still be historically great. So in
a strange way, the fact that they won without
him proved how good of a coach he was. That's
the argument. He built a self -sustaining machine
that didn't need him on the sideline every night.
That's a charitable way to look at it. I just
think poor Luke Walton got robbed of a pretty
amazing line on his resume. Well, he did get
a head coaching job with the Lakers shortly after,
largely off the buzz from that run. So he did
OK for himself in the end. Fair enough. Let's
shift gears a little bit to the background of
these coaches. We've talked about how it's often
former players who become coaches. It's the standard
path. I played the game so I can teach the game.
But very few are truly great at both. It's the
great player fallacy. We assume that because,
say, Magic Johnson saw the game perfectly as
a player, he could automatically teach it. But
often, the all -time great players make terrible
coaches because they just lack patience. Right.
They can't understand why a role player can't
just be better. Exactly. Why don't you just see
the pass and throw it? That's what I would do.
It's frustrating for them. Just see the floor.
Well, not everyone has Hall of Fame court vision.
But there is a very, very small group of men
who have mastered both sides of it, the dual
threats. A very exclusive club. Who are they?
There are only three men who have been inducted
into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of
Fame as both a player and as a coach. That's
an incredibly short list. It has to be one of
the rarest achievements in sports. It is. The
three are Tom Heinsohn, Bill Sharman. and Lenny
Wilkins. Heinsohn is Mr. Celtic through and through.
He bled green. Sharman, we mentioned earlier,
is one of the few to win COI and a title with
the Lakers. And Lenny Wilkins was the all -time
winningest coach for a very long time. And what
it demonstrates is a complete, you know, 360
-degree mastery of the sport. To have the physical
gifts and the basketball instincts to be a Hall
of Fame player, and then to be able to translate
all of that into teaching, strategy, and ego
management as a coach. It's a rare combination
of left brain and right brain. You have to be
able to do it, and then you have to be able to
explain how you did it to someone who has half
your talent. That's the hard part. That is the
impossible part for most. But we are seeing a
shift now, aren't we? The modern coach looks
different. They aren't always former all -stars.
Sometimes they're guys who barely played in college,
if at all. Absolutely. The rise of the video
coordinator coach. Yeah. The grinder. the guy
who worked his way up from the mailroom. But
specifically, we are seeing the NBA G League
become a real breeding ground for head coaches,
not just for players. The G League, which is
the NBA's official minor league, who's the poster
child for this new pathway? Without a doubt,
it's Nick Nurse. He won the coach of the year
with the Toronto Raptors in the 2019 -20 season,
the year after they won the title. But before
that, he was a lifer in the minors. Oh, yeah.
He was grinding for years in the D League, as
it was called then, coaching teams like the Iowa
Energy and the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. And
he holds a very unique record. What is it? He
is the only coach. to win coach of the year in
both the NBA and the NBA G League. He won the
G League award back in 2011. That is really cool.
It validates the idea that coaching is a craft.
It's not just about whether you played in the
NBA finals. It's about logging the hours, drawing
up plays in empty gyms in Iowa, riding the bus,
and learning how to manage a group of guys who
are fighting for their professional lives. And
NBA front offices have absolutely noticed. They're
hiring guys like Mark Danio in Oklahoma City,
another G League alum who just won. award, they
are realizing that tactical innovation often
comes from the lower leagues, where coaches have
to be more creative to win because they don't
have a LeBron James to just bail them out of
a bad play. Speaking of Mark Daniel, he represents
the modern era of winners. We're in the mid 2020s
now in our timeline. How has the voting changed
recently? It feels like the power of the narrative
is stronger than ever. It has, and it's seemingly
become more consensus driven. We had a truly
historic moment. In the 2022 -23 season with
Mike Brown of the Sacramento Kings. Light the
beam. That was such a fun season to watch. I
remember seeing that giant purple laser shooting
into the night sky after every win. It was a
whole cultural phenomenon. And the voters were
swept up, and Mike Brown became the first unanimous
coach of the year in NBA history. Wait, really?
Unanimous? We just talked about the 73 -win Warriors.
We talked about the 72 -win Bulls. None of those
coaches were unanimous winners. Nope. In all
those years, there was always at least one writer
who voted for someone else. Maybe a local writer
voting for their home coach. Or maybe someone
just wanted to be a contrarian. But with Mike
Brown, every single voter put him first on their
ballot. Why? What was so completely undeniable
about that Kings season? It was the narrative
of the drought. The Sacramento Kings had not
made the playoffs in 16 consecutive years. It
was the longest active drought in all of North
American professional sports. It was this dark
cloud that hung over the entire city. And Mike
Brown came in. He came in. He installed a historically
efficient offense. He created that whole light
the beam tradition, which galvanized the fan
base. And he broke the curse in his very first
year. So the story was perfect. It was a perfect,
undeniable story. And unlike the Warriors or
the Bulls, where you could always argue, well,
they have Michael Jordan or they have Steph Curry,
the Kings were seen as a flawed roster with a
losing history. Mike Brown got all the credit
for the cultural transformation. He turned a
losing culture into a winning one, seemingly
overnight. And it's interesting that Mike Brown
had won the award before, too. He won it with
LeBron the Cavs way back in 2009. So he joins
that multi -team club. He does. And another recent
repeat winner is Tom Thibodeau. He won with the
Bulls in 2011. That was the Derrick Rose MVP
year. And then he won it again with the New York
Knicks in 2020 -21. Phipps is a very distinct
brand of coaching, isn't he? Oh, yeah. Hard -nosed
defense, lots of yelling, playing his starters,
heavy minutes. It's his signature. And it seems
to work, at least for turning franchises around.
He took a Knicks team that had been a laughingstock
for years and made them a tough, respectable
playoff team instantly. Again, the award rewards
the turnaround. He instilled discipline where
there was none. The quintessential example of
the expectation gap at work. So we've covered
the mechanics, the legends, the curse, the anomalies.
As we start to wrap up this deep dive, I want
to just step back for a second. When we look
at this trophy, the Red Auerbach Trophy, what
does it actually symbolize? Because we've established
it's not always for the best coach in terms of
wins. It's not usually the guy who wins the title.
What is it really for? I think it symbolizes
the maximization of potential. to me is the common
thread that connects the 73 -win Warriors of
Steve Kerr and the 33 -win Bulls of Johnny Kerr.
That's a great connection. In both of those very
different cases, the coach took what was on paper
and squeezed every single drop of performance
out of it. There was nothing left on the table.
It's an efficiency award, in a way. I think so,
yeah. It measures the delta between expectation
and reality. How much better did you make this
group of 12 guys than they had any right to be?
It also seems to measure the human element, the
pure ability to get 12 different people, 12 different
egos to pull in the exact same direction for
six months. Oh, absolutely. In this era of advanced
analytics and spreadsheets, the Coach of the
Year award is often a nod to the psychological
aspect of the game. It's about buy -in. You can
have the best plays in the world drawn up on
your clipboard, but if the players don't believe
in you, you're going to lose. I want to leave
our listeners with a final thought that has been
nagging me since we discussed Doc Rivers and
Johnny Kerr. We tend to glorify the coaches who
win rings. We call them the greats, the legends,
Pop, Phil Jackson, Red Auerbach. But hearing
all these stories... Is it possible that the
hardest coaching job and therefore maybe the
best coaching job is actually done on the bad
teams? That is the provocative question, isn't
it? Is it harder to steer a Ferrari that is designed
to go 200 miles per hour? Or is it harder to
take a beat up old sedan with a leaking radiator
and somehow coax it to go 60 miles per hour on
the highway without breaking down? Doc Rivers
dragging that magic team to a .500 record suggests
that sometimes just finishing the race is the
miracle, not winning it. If the definition of
the award is most integral to success, you could
make a very strong argument that the coach of
the bad team is more integral. If you took Phil
Jackson off the 72 -win bowls, they might still
win 60 games on talent alone. If you took Doc
Rivers off that magic team, they might have won
five. That is something to chew on the next time
you're watching a game and you see a coach screaming
on the sideline of a team that's 10 games under
.500 -0. He might actually be doing the best
job in the entire league, even if he never gets
a trophy for it. He just might be. Well, we hope
this deep dive gave you a new perspective on
the people pacing the sidelines. Look past the
box score, watch the timeouts, watch the body
language between the players and the coach. That's
where the real game is being played. Until the
next deep dive. Take care, everyone.