The Golden State Warriors, the prohibitive favorite to win the 2015 NBA title, were in a much different situation one year ago. In fact, in May of 2014, Golden State was in the exact position the Chicago Bulls find themselves today. The parallels between the two teams are endless.
Multiple seasons of being a contender but never breaking through in the playoffs. Check.
Huge tension between a beloved head coach and upper management. Check.
The notion that there is no better coaching candidates than the one already employed. Check.
The players turning against management and backing the coach. Check.
Young players with the ability to turn into stars. Check.
A great starting five that could be elite if it featured young bench players instead of experienced veterans. Check (Arguable in the Bulls case).
Limited cap flexibility in the summer. Check.
An offense underperforming to its capabilities. Check.
A new head coach transforming the contender into the best team in the league the following year? Check for one team.
I know what you’re saying: The Bulls can’t be next year’s Warriors. How many teams in the history of NBA have gone from frequent playoff contender without a title to (imminent) champion the next season by solely adding role players and a new head coach? Next to none. The Warriors are the deviation not the norm. A jump like that never happens. There is no way we would see it two years in a row in the NBA.
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That’s a good point. There might be some validity to that. But, the reason we never see a jump like that: Contending teams normally don’t realize they have the wrong head coach until they already missed their shot. By the time they have the right coach the window for a potential dynasty has already closed. The team has either already split apart, the star players have passed their prime, or a better team has passed them.
Examples of potential champions firing their head coach too late in just the past 15 years are the Nets and Byron Scott in 2004, the Timberwolves and Flip Saunders in 2005, the Cavs and Mike Brown in 2010, and quite possibly the Thunder and Scott Brooks this year.
Young teams on the rise always overrate two things. The first is how long their window is. Everyone thinks all the stars will stay together for a decade and everything will work out. That is fantasyland. Players leave for more money, people get injured, bad luck happens, or the league passes a team by. This is yet another reason to appreciate the Spurs more. A team contending with same group of players for longer than five seasons is an NBA implausibility.
The second thing teams on the rise overrate is the aptitude of the head coach they currently have. Too often teams think the coach is the reason for the massive improvement and not the development of young players into stars. Stick any competent coach on the sideline of the Thunder and, besides this past year, they are going to win 50 games. Stars make coaches way more often than coaches make stars. Once the club realizes they are never going to win with the coach they already have, they are too late. The opportunity is missed.
Apr 13, 2015; Brooklyn, NY, USA; Chicago Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau argues a foul call during the third quarter against the Brooklyn Nets at Barclays Center. Chicago Bulls won 113-86. Mandatory Credit: Anthony Gruppuso-USA TODAY Sports
How the Bulls Replicate Golden State
The Bulls, right or wrong, realized sometime this season they don’t have the right coach to win a championship. The hope is that the realization came before the Bulls missed their window of opportunity. The timing of this realization could be the difference between the Bulls becoming the next early 2000s Nets (you may not remember who was on the team because they never won a championship) and the 2014 Warriors. In case you wondering Jimmy Butler is 25, Derrick Rose is 26, and Nikola Mirotic is 24. I’m leaning towards the Bulls becoming the latter.
What did the Warriors do last season that the Bulls can’t do this summer with a new head coach? Sure, the biggest difference was Stephen Curry making a massive jump from All-Star to MVP. But why can’t Butler do the same thing? What would sound more crazy: Saying Butler is going to win the 2016 MVP right now or saying Curry was going to win the 2015 MVP in May of 2014? Every year Butler has been in the league he has made a massive jump. The 2015-16 season isn’t going to be any different.
Even if the notion that Butler could win MVP is a little far-fetched, the rest of the changes the Warriors made are well within the grasp of Chicago. The biggest difference this season for Golden State was selecting an unknown to NBA coaching, Steve Kerr, as the new head coach. The biggest risk in selecting Kerr, and what turned out to be his biggest asset, was nobody knowing how good he really was. The choice was controversial, but ultimately brilliant. The Bulls have the option right now to make a similar move.
Kerr perfected resting his players and using the bench properly, which ultimately led to healthy players throughout the season, and in turn, improved chemistry. No doubt any choice the Bulls make for next season will be told meticulously to use the bench better. And under Kerr, that bench was the best in the league.
In Tony Snell, Nikola Mirotic and Taj Gibson, Chicago is already going to have able players on the bench, but some cap flexibility and possible trades could lead to an elite second unit.
But without a doubt the biggest improvement Kerr made as head coach was putting young, impactful players in the starting lineup over experienced veterans. The impact Harrison Barnes and Draymond Green have made as starters in place of Andre Iguodala and David Lee has been profound. Green and Barnes give Golden State four hyper-athletic, unselfish, three-point shooters. Golden State’s five-man starting unit could quite possibly be the most lethal in NBA history. A new Bulls coach could make a similar modification with the Bulls starters next season. Whoever it will be, he will have options as to who starts Chicago. Just like Kerr had in Golden State.
It seems crazy to think the Bulls can get to the level the Warriors are at now and I don’t think that will happen. But even so, it’s not crazy to think that the team can make a massive leap next season. The Bulls can do this because they still control their fate in, behind a star player (See: Butler, Jimmy), the most important asset an NBA team can have right now: a head coach. And unlike star players, head coaches aren’t normally desired by contending teams. The Bulls may be able to lure a candidate that normally turns down NBA head coaching opportunities simply because they give the coach a chance to succeed in the league immediately.
The Value of a Great Head Coach
We are at a time where the NBA has taken the forefront as a model child for the importance of numbers and predictive models. Every team that is still playing uses analytics. The final four teams ranked first, second, fourth, and seventh in 3-point attempts, the darling of NBA numbers guys. Basically anything that may be perceived to give an NBA team a better chance to win is studied meticulously by any team that is actually going to win.
Except one: the value of an innovative head coach.
All U Can Heat
Yes, the head coach is one thing remaining in the NBA that hasn’t had every ounce of possible inefficiency squeezed out of it. The problem is analytics are driven by data, and data is the product of production on the court. Because of this, we know the value of shooting, and how Ricky Rubio and Rajon Rondo—went from being valuable point guards to unwanted by any good team. Head coaches aren’t studied because most of the smart teams that use numbers to win in the league are probably already winning. Therefore, as discussed earlier, those teams think they currently have the coach of the future.
In the same league where post-up players went from a franchise-requirement to extinct in less than a decade because of their inefficiencies, Kerr still made less than Lee this season. Actually, a lot less.
How could that make sense?
Kerr transformed Golden State and Lee rarely gets minutes for them anymore. Yet, Kerr recieved in the neighborhood of $5 million this year and Lee made over $15 million. That contract may be a bad example because it is such an albatross (even though every single team has at least one albatross contract on their books, but we can pretend like GMs actually are smart now).
Instead of Lee, Shaun Livingston can be used as the example. Livingston, like Kerr, was signed in the summer of 2014 and is still going to make more than his head coach. Livingston is a valuable piece of Golden State this season, but still has one-tenth the impact Kerr made.
Because Lee and Livingston actually played on the court and produced data, I can tell you they had Estimated Wins Added or EWAs of 2.9 and 1.4 this season. So combined, if you were one to embrace the evolution of the NBA, David Lee and Shaun Livingston added about 4.5 wins to the Warriors this season for the price of around $20 million.
As for Steve Kerr, conservatively, I would say he was good for 15 wins during the regular season. Seems like a pretty good deal for the Warriors given that Kerr was smart enough to make that starting lineup switch that revolutionized the NBA. Add that with the fact there is no chance the Warriors would be on the way to winning the title this season without Kerr and I would say they got a pretty good deal on his contract. That is, of course, the same contract that was dubbed “an insane amount of money” by For the Win.
So between the difference of Kerr and Mark Jackson’s contracts, it cost the Warriors an extra $3 million this season to go from “Contender with about 20 percent chance of winning the West” to “(On their way to) One of the ten best teams ever and leader in revolutionizing the small-ball, three-point-shooting-obsessive NBA.”
I would say the coaching market still has some inefficiencies.
And head coaches matter. A lot.
May 12, 2015; Cleveland, OH, USA; Chicago Bulls guard Derrick Rose (1) reacts in the fourth quarter against the Cleveland Cavaliers in game five of the second round of the NBA Playoffs at Quicken Loans Arena. Mandatory Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports
Finding the Right Head Coach
The Bulls still have the opportunity to do the same as the Warriors. The NBA’s biggest inefficiency right now (by a wide margin) is inability to predict intelligent, franchise-altering head coaches. I know the Warriors franchise was altered by more than Kerr this season, but I also know the Warriors wouldn’t be a huge favorite to win the title right now if it was still Jackson there instead of Kerr.
Did anyone think Steve Kerr would be doing this for the Warriors before the season? No, or every team would have tried to get him and offered him a lot more than $25 million for 5 years. What made Kerr so compelling was the unknown. No one knew how good Kerr was because he had never been a head coach in the NBA. Everyone knew he was really smart, but a lot of people were leery on him because he was unproven.
Any coach can gain experience. What coaches can’t gain is the ability to understand everything that goes into winning a title. Guys like Kerr, Rick Carlisle, Gregg Popovich, and Phil Jackson—those guys understood what it takes. And it was apparent from very early on, without exception. It didn’t take decades for these coaches to finally climb to mountain towards and NBA title. Everyone saw how apparent these guys’ genius was very quickly. Either a head coach has what it takes to win a title or he doesn’t. He doesn’t gain that through years at the helm. They know basketball but, more importantly, they know everything else it takes to win a title. They are masters of all intangibles that make a team great. All those intangibles were what the Bulls were missing this season.
Fans love to talk about how in the NBA you need one of the ten best players in the league to even have a chance of winning the title. But how about the coach? How talented does a team have to be to overcome a coach that isn’t one of the best in the league? (See: Thunder, Oklahoma City) How good does a coach have to be to give his team a chance of winning the title? Top-10 in the NBA? There are much less coaches that have everything it takes to win a title than people think. Maybe five or six active ones. Those coaches know there is more to basketball than just playing basketball. Popovich is the best coach in the NBA and never actually played in the league.
Maybe there is a reason that those guys have success wherever they go, and the well-respected coaches with experience never actually win anything. Why did the Warriors make such a good choice? Smart coaches are almost never available. The really good ones stay employed for decades. A great head coach is on top of every aspect that goes into a title-winning team. Most of those aspects aren’t on the court. Tom Thibodeau was only about everything that was basketball-related. He was in tune to nothing associated to the psychology of his players. More than anything, the Bulls’ demise was a result from lacking the intangibles it took to win.
Are you still skeptical on the theory that it takes a lot more than preparation and talent to win a title? Here is a quote from Kobe Bryant on the impact Phil Jackson made on him:
"“When he came here everything changed for me on how I viewed the game. To that point I really thought about the game from a tactical perspective: Executing and fundamentals and training, right? Surface things. I learned the spirituality of the game. The mindfulness that comes with the game. Understanding how to put yourself aside, how to quiet your ego and play effortless basketball. And that approach to the game is something that I though really separated me from the pack.”"
That is exactly what the Bulls need. They already have that tactical stuff. They must get a head coach that will teach them the “mindfulness that comes with the game.”
But that is the hard part.
Apr 20, 2015; Chicago, IL, USA; Chicago Bulls guard Jimmy Butler (21) practices before the game against the Milwaukee Bucks in game two of the first round of the 2015 NBA Playoffs at the United Center. Mandatory Credit: Mike DiNovo-USA TODAY Sports
The Bulls’ Future Head Coach
You can always find those NBA bottom-feeder coaches with that massively overrated experience. Vinny Del Negro, Alvin Gentry, Mike D’Antoni, Scott Skiles and Nate McMillan are all former NBA head coaches looking for jobs. They would be, for the most part, the popular option. They know what it takes to win in the league and have done it all before. They could help the Bulls. Maybe add a couple of wins and change the style of play. But it takes more than that to be good enough to win 16 playoff games.
Jackson was all about everything that wasn’t basketball and has the most titles ever because of it. He has always gotten great players to go to another level. The same is true for Kerr, Popovich or any other great coach. Those are the coaches that win titles, and that’s why the Warriors are going to win this year.
The Bulls need a coach like that if they want to get where they want to go.
One thing is true: After watching the Bulls the past five seasons, Thibodeau does not have “the mindfulness that comes with the game.” Thibodeau has perfected all of that tactical stuff without thinking about the greater picture, and the Bulls have zero Finals appearances to show for it.
Chicago is going to need a coach that incorporates all of that other stuff.
If they don’t, the coach is just going to be a worse version of what they already have.
Next: Tom Thibodeau to be fired by Friday?
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