We have access to more information about basketball than we’ve ever had at any point in the game’s 133-year history.
Synergy, Second Spectrum, Cleaning The Glass, Basketball Reference, NBA.com’s official stats page – if you want to know some arcane piece of minutiae, no matter how obscure, you can track it down. An infinite series of Russian Nesting Doll-style games-within-games-within-games can unfold if you have the patience to sift through endless amounts of data and you know how to translate that data into language other people can understand.
Even with all this information at our disposal, there is one aspect of this sport that remains elusive to analysis. Ironically, it’s the aspect of this sport that most fans and pundits feel compelled to discuss as though they know everything there is to know about it.
Coaching.
While almost every other facet of basketball analysis has grown more sophisticated and rooted in empirical data, conversations about coaching remain strictly “vibes only” without any real idea of what separates good coaches from lousy ones. The NBA’s annual Coach of the Year award has no way to take into account the thousands of nuanced, behind-the-scenes skills that actually contribute to successful coaching, so the award typically goes to the team who exceeded preseason expectations the most and/or overcame the most adversity – things fans and media can actually wrap their heads around.
Perhaps most frustrating is the idea that a coach’s ability remains frozen in amber from the day they’re trusted with a head job. Fail once, regardless of the circumstance, and that’s it. You stink forever. A good coach is good and a bad coach is bad – forever.
A basketball coach is just like anyone else in any other job. They acquire new experiences and reflect on what worked – and what didn’t – at previous stops. They may have certain core philosophies about how a defense is supposed to function, for example, but if they are successful enough to land a high-profile college job or one of the 30 NBA jobs, flexibility and adaptability are core job functions – not just adjectives listed in a LinkedIn profile.
Take Kenny Atkinson as an example. When Atkinson – a highly respected assistant coach with the New York Knicks and Atlanta Hawks – landed his first head coaching job with the Brooklyn Nets in 2016, most people figured he would bring the high-scoring 3-point-heavy style his bosses Mike D’Antoni and Mike Budholzer were known for, but they didn’t really know much else about him. And how would we? No fan and only a handful of media members actually know anything tangible about assistant coaches.
Nobody expected this Nets franchise to compete with any real verve or vigor after the fallout of the Mikhail Prokorov era, but Atkinson took this job by the collar and built this team into a feistier-than-expected group that eventually snuck into the playoffs by his third season. The team was so competitive, in fact, that Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving decided it would be a good idea to sign there.
But one thing we do know about coaching? Star players react to it differently.
Tensions arose when Atkinson preferred to play Jarrett Allen over DeAndre Jordan. Durant and Irving preferred their buddy Jordan. Was Atkinson right? Of course he was. Did it matter? Of course he didn’t. Atkinson stepped down right before the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily shut down the league in 2020. Did anything else weird happen with the Nets after Atkinson left? I can’t remember.
Regardless of the circumstances – both public and private – that led to this separation, everyone who follows basketball had all the shorthand they needed on Atkinson. Talented coach, hardworking, but fights with superstars. Fair or unfair, it took another four years before another franchise gave Atkinson another crack at coaching a team.
At the time of this writing, Atkinson has yet to lose any of the 15 games he has coached the Cleveland Cavaliers. He is the frontrunner for Coach of the Year and he has this team full of seemingly incongruous pieces playing almost flawless basketball. Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland isn’t a seamless pairing. Neither is Evan Mobley and Atkinson’s old pal Allen. But something is working.
Did Atkinson learn some lessons from his Nets departure? Did he pick up a few things from Ty Lue and Steve Kerr when he served as lead assistant on the Clippers and Warriors? Unquestionably. Does anyone know specifically what those things might be? Not really.
Sure, an armchair coach can have opinions on playing rotations and timeout deployment and all the things we can see with our own two eyes. But these observable details make up such a small percentage of the overall coaching pie.
Coaches – particularly NBA coaches – are under such intense scrutiny over things that nobody understands. Part of the reason is most fans can picture themselves as the coach. I know I can’t do what Anthony Edwards does, but could I throw on a quarter-zip fleece, scream at a referee, and scribble on a whiteboard during timeouts? Sure.
But could any of us actually do what these coaches do – managing personalities, developing chemistry, curating relationships – day in and day out? It seems like the most stressful life imaginable. Even future Hall-of-Fame coaches make game-losing mistakes, such as Erik Spoelstra’s phantom timeout costing the Miami Heat a game against the Detroit Pistons. But the reason why Spoelstra is still one of the best in his profession is what he does the next day, and the day after that, as the chief architect of Heat Culture.
Coaching isn’t static. Coaches learn, improve, change, adapt. Some stagnate and devolve into stubbornness and rigidity. Budenholzer isn’t the same guy he was in Atlanta or Milwaukee. Doc Rivers isn’t the same guy he was in Boston or LA. It is a results-oriented business with very clear metrics for success.
But the job itself remains a mystery. Let’s keep it that way. In this era of unlimited information, the unknown helps make the sport more interesting.
And 1’s.
• Dyson Daniels is putting together a legitimate case to challenge the 7-foot-4 shotblocking alien from France for Defense Player of the Year. Heading into last night’s thriller against the Portland Trailblazers, Daniels had collected 42 steals and 83 deflections. Nobody else is even close to him in either category. He isn’t recklessly gambling for these, either. He is consistently in the right spot – both on the ball and off-ball – and he reacts a split second quicker than opposing offenses expect him to. Prior to that Blazers game (when Dyson snagged “only” two steals), Daniels was working on a four-game streak with at least six steals per contest. It’s absurd.
• Shoutout to Wisconsin transfer John Tonje, who played like a man among boys in Wisconsin’s 103-88 win over No. 9 Arizona on Friday. Tonje, the 6-5 power guard out of Omaha who first suited up for the Colorado State Rams back in 2019, joined the Badgers after a foot injury derailed his lone season in Missouri. It was Tonje’s 134th collegiate basketball game, and he had never had a game anything like this. Tommy Lloyd’s squad is big, deep, and athletic, and Tonje made his 41 points on 14 shots look easy. He got to the line a Dwyane Wade-esque 22 times, making 21 of them.
• Stat of the week: 109. That’s the number of points De’Aaron Fox hung in consecutive games against Minnesota (60) and Utah (49). According to NBA.com Stats, Fox fell one point shy of Kobe Bryant’s 110 points in consecutive nights in 2007 for the biggest back-to-back scoring barrage in 50 years. Everything before that is obviously Wilt-centric and completely out of reach.
