There’s something innately futile about ranking coaches in basketball because it’s a sport so defined by improvisation. You never quite know when you see a great play, whether it was a brilliant set piece designed by a coach on a white board or the result of a single player’s unique instincts. The modern NBA is as much about personality management as it is strategy, and almost all of that comes behind closed doors.
Doing these rankings — which come one day before our annual top 100 player rankings will be published — in September only makes it harder because this is the moment in the calendar in which we know of the fewest bad coaches. If Adrian Griffin was still coaching the Bucks, he would hold the No. 30 slot here, but Adrian Griffin being that obviously bad ensured his demise midway through his first season. Nobody thinks they have a bad coach right now. Inevitably, a few coaches will sink when the games actually start.
The top end of the spectrum is just as difficult. We’ve had six champions in the past six seasons. They have been coached by six different men. In fact, one-third of active NBA head coaches right now have won a championship. They aren’t all going to rank in the top 10. That’s the nature of basketball. It’s a player-driven sport. Is Michael Malone a great coach or is he just Nikola Jokic’s coach? Is Chauncey Billups a bad coach, or is he just coaching a bad roster?
As I’ve written in the past, coaching careers are inexorably defined by circumstance. Would we care who Phil Jackson was if it had been, say, the Nets who had found him coaching in Puerto Rico instead of the Bulls? Is Pat Riley a legend if a completely irreplicable series of events hadn’t given him Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his first job? How many legendary coaching careers never got off of the ground because they just never got the right job? So keep in mind as we rank the 2024-25 NBA head coaches that this is an inherently flawed exercise. For the most part, we don’t really know how good most of these coaches are. In many cases, we’ll…
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