Doc Rivers Has Run Out of Time With the LA Clippers
Coaching Matters?
Whether the chicken or the egg came first doesn’t apply to great coaches because you cant have one without the other. Phil Jackson coached MJ, then Shaq and Kobe, and then Kobe again. Bill Belichick has coached Tom Brady for almost two decades. Bochy has Buster and Bumgardner, and Kerr has KD, Curry, and Klay.
Great players enhance the legacy of a great coach and great coaches do the same for great players. But without a great coach, a great player is just a good player with no hardware.
Coaching matter the most in baseball, it matters more in football, and it matter less in basketball. In the NBA, talent wins titles. Every year there are three or four teams with a realistic shot at making the NBA Finals, let alone winning it all. It is rare a team unexpectedly defies the odds and wins a title in any sport. In basketball it is even more rare.
The examples often used in this scenario of a less-talented team defeating a superior one are the 2004 Detroit Pistons, and 2011 Dallas Mavericks. Actually, Detroit was the best defensive team in the league that year and what coached, oh by the way, by Larry Brown. And Dallas boasted two future Hall-of-Famers in Dirk and J-Kidd, while also surrounded by the likes of Jason Terry, Tyson Chandler, Caron Butler, Shawn Marion, and Peja Stojakavich.
RUMOR: LA Clippers are trying to steal Jerry West
Less than talented the teams may have been, but when raw talent maxes out, it is coaching that pushes the team that final inch over the mountain. Larry Brown and Rick Carlisle got the most out of their teams in 2004 and 2011, and they took home the trophy.
Since 1980 there have been 11 NBA franchises that have taken home the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Compare that to 21 MLB teams that have won a World Series, and 16 NFL franchises that have won a Super Bowl. The last three seasons, five different baseball teams have played in the World Series, and five different NFL franchises have played on sport’s biggest stage. Meanwhile the NBA has seen exactly two teams participate in each of the last three NBA Finals. If parity exists in sports, the NBA hasn’t seen it yet.
Parity, or competition as it was once called, is not essential to the success of professional sports. There will always be competition in sports. In fact, the NBA has even made losing a competition. While we may know which teams will be left standing at the end of an NBA season, there are 28 other teams, all with their personal objectives for each season, and while firing an NBA coach has become a modern sports cliché, it the first logical step when a team continually underachieves.
Scotty Brooks took OKC to an NBA Finals – sorry Scotty, not good enough. Mark Jackson won 51 games with a Golden State team clearly trending upwards – mama, there goes that man…right out the door. David Blatt lost the 2015 Finals with an injured Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, then started the 2016 season 30 and 11 – whatever the Israeli word is for “hit the bricks Blatt.”
Improvement is the name of the game as an NBA coach, and if you’re not improving you are getting worse, because everyone else is. Doc was hired in June of 2013 as the star coach to lead a star set of characters. But while the LA Clippers plateaued in two conference semi-final exists, the West was getting better.
A quiet kid from San Diego State took the torch from San Antonio legends while the Clippers struggled to advance past the first round. Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook became the games most electric players while Blake Griffin was learning to score away from the basket. Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson shot their way into NBA history while the Clippers won 50 games, year after year, with no improvement.