Let’s start with some math: Five teams have won an NBA championship since 2020, the Los Angeles Lakers are one of them, yet they are now on their third coach over that time span with the hiring of JJ Redick.
Frank Vogel won a title, then got fired. Darvin Ham made the conference finals, then got fired. Now Redick parachutes in as the hot-shot hire as we hear ridiculous comparisons to Pat Riley and Steve Kerr and Eric Spoelstra. It’s almost too absurd to even laugh.
Yeah, we get it. Redick is a smart guy. He looks and sounds sharp. The Riley comp, if you really want to be this lazy, lands in your lap from a headshot standpoint, as does Kerr because of their similar player profiles and broadcasting backgrounds.
This isn’t to say Redick won’t be a successful coach. Or hell, even an all-time great one. But if he is, like those names above, he’ll be the exception. Not the rule. The rule is that almost all NBA coaches are tied almost directly to their rosters. They might get a little more or less out of the group they’ve been granted, but not much. The Lakers, who have hired and fired seven coaches since Phil Jackson left in 2012, aren’t alone in always thinking they’ve managed to identify the exception.
To run down the list of coaches that were supposed to make a significant difference only to fare, barring a roster improvement, much the same as their predecessor would take forever, but let’s look at a few recent examples.
The Hawks hired Quin Snyder to replace Nate McMillan — who, it’s worth noting, was largely the benefit of circumstance himself as Atlanta got healthy in 2021 just as he was replacing Lloyd Pierce — when it turned out that McMillan, with a few more years of evidence, wasn’t actually able to lift a Hawks roster that can’t defend and is too reliant on stagnant individual creation.
Snyder came in with a plan to play faster and shoot more 3s, and the Hawks got worse. Doc Rivers was brought in to replace Adrian Griffin in Milwaukee, and the Bucks, record wise, got worse. Rivers was also tabbed as the guy to…
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