With the NBA play-offs just about here, The National’s resident American sports bros Kevin Jeffers and Jonathan Raymond talk about who they think should win the NBA’s biggest awards.
Today, they vary differently on how to vote for Coach of the Year.
KJ
Stephen Curry has the MVP locked up. Karl Anthony-Towns will win Rookie of the Year in a very deep class. The usual names will dot the All-NBA teams.
But who wins the Coach of the Year award?
It’d be obvious to give it to the coach of the one team dominating the zeitgeist all season. But Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors, missed more than half his team’s games while assistant Luke Walton admirably held the reigns. Kerr – who last season narrowly lost the award to Atlanta Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer in a season-long two-man race – is thus disqualified for the sake of this argument.
So, does the league just give it to the coach of the next best team, Gregg Popovich and the nearly-as-great San Antonio Spurs? He’d get my vote, but that’s mostly based on the fact that he’s one of the five greatest coaches in league history and deserves as much praise as possible. There’s no coach I’d rather have, and no one out-did him this year in my opinion.
Jonny Boy, Is there anyone more deserving than Pop?
JR
Can we not give it to Luke Walton? Dude took the Warriors to 39-4.
But anyway I suppose this ultimately is a question of how we want to define great coaching. If we’re talking pure coaching achievement – if the question to determine Coach of the Year is just, “Who is the best coach?” – then I don’t think there’s an argument to be made against Popovich.
And maybe it should be that simple. But I’m more drawn to more-with-less candidates. I like my Coaches of the Year to be captains bravely guiding their ships through the stormy waters of their own team’s talent limitations.
Brad Stevens and the Celtics. Steve Clifford and the Hornets. Terry Stotts and the Trail Blazers. All feel like more compelling examples of the art of coaching than Popovich in 2016.
Tell me why this is misguided.
KJ
It’s not, but none of those coaches’ teams have absolutely wowed the way Budenholzer and Kerr did last year. They’re all good stories who have exceeded expectations, but they also sort of cancel each other out.
The Celtics are a great defensive team, with all credit going to Stevens. Clifford’s small-ball adjustments have been just what the Hornets needed to take a big step. Stotts is one of the league’s most underrated coaches, and is probably my favourite of the ones you mentioned. You could also make good arguments for Stan Van Gundy in Detroit, Dwane Casey for Toronto, or even Rick Carlisle, who always does more with less in Dallas.
It’s an interesting race. I think the voters will reward Casey, Stevens and Clifford, but I can’t think of any reason one is more deserving over the other, or more than Pops.
So say you had a vote, who gets it?
JR
A glut of similarly accomplished and similarly deserving coaches this year is a problem, as you point out. Picking one can feel a bit arbitrary – only underscoring Pop’s case.
But I don’t know that I really think they are all that close. Or, at least, if there is no significant difference in kind, I see one in degree.
I backed Stevens a few months ago, and I think he’s still deserving, mostly because of the more-with-less candidates, he’s the only one with a team that I could actually squint and see making the Finals.
With all due respect to hurdles overcome by others elsewhere, the Celtics are not just a cute story of over-achievement. It is not just that players like Jae Crowder, Isaiah Thomas and Jared Sullinger are thriving in Stevens’ ecosystem, an ecosystem which has allowed them to thrive that speaks to his coaching this year.
It's also that they have an identity, that they play a distinct style, that they will be a real player in the East play-offs, and then that there's Stevens' heavy imprint in all that.
(Casey, by the way, also qualifies under this slightly adjusted standard, but he also has a top-10 player to work with in Kyle Lowry.)
Narrow it down like that, and what Pop has to answer to, to still be Coach of the Year becomes a little less amorphous.
KJ
I won’t bite on the Celtics-making-the-Finals comment (spoiler: I disagree), but Stevens is a great coach who will get there one day. Just not with this team.
It’s a fine choice, but the Celtics haven’t been so incredibly surprising or broken out so much that I could pick Stevens over Popovich. If anything, the leap Toronto has made has saved Casey’s job and, he’d be more deserving.
JR
Don’t sleep on the Celtics doing play-off things. Like I said, you have to squint, and you have to go down a list that includes basically the East’s top 5 (I’m not buying Charlotte in the post-season) and West’s top 3, and it necessitates being very generous to the likes of Boston, Miami and Oklahoma City, but I’m feeling generous.
I think Casey’s case rests on how you see Kyle Lowry. Top-10 player (or producer or contributor or whatever) or not? A debate for another time.
But on Popovich – let me draw you out a little bit on Pop, for the sake of argument.
Here are true things about the San Antonio Spurs:
1) They have the best per-100-possessions net rating in basketball, and it’s not really close (they are 0.9 points better than Golden State).
2) It is, in fact, the best net rating (plus-12.3/100) in the entire 19 seasons of the nba.com/stats archive, just ahead of the 96/97 Bulls (plus-12.0).
3) The Spurs are, despite this piece of evidence that they may very well be the best team of the last 20 years, neither going to match the win total of those Bulls, nor of these Warriors.
So does that speak at all to Pop’s worthiness for this award? By which I mean – I don’t think the Spurs aren’t also on record pace with the Warriors because they couldn’t, but because they did not try. Which makes sense – they’re older, and Pop isn’t wasting his time on regular-season achievement he doesn’t need.
But shouldn’t regular-season achievement count for this award? (And why can’t we just give this award after the play-offs? Another debate for another time.)
KJ
All of that makes me like Popovich even more. There’s no discounting him just because these Spurs aren’t these Warriors or the ‘96 Bulls. Golden State – chasing history and with two coaches – could never let up all year, and that’s because this season the Spurs were constantly in their rear-view.
Stevens did plenty, and will win this award one day. But this year’s Celtics aren’t the team to take him there.
When in doubt, give the award to the best coach. That’s Popovich now, and it will be until he retires.
JR
If that’s the standard – who is the best coach right now – then yeah I agree. And, to be fair, it probably makes a lot more sense than all the gymnastics I have to do to get to Brad Stevens.
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