David Leonhardt – of the New York Times – has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for
Leonhardt is known for his writing on economics. But once upon a time he also wrote about sports. And back when the Wages of Wins was published, Leonhardt made an effort to teach me how to write (a story I told back in 2007).
Unfortunately, David’s efforts didn’t lead too much in positive results :) I have always appreciated, though, that he made the effort and am very happy to see his work rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize.
Beyond Leonhardt winning the Pulitzer Prize, I also wanted to offer a brief comment on another story that appeared yesterday.
Rick Adleman and the Houston Rockets have parted ways. Adelman currently ranks 8th in NBA history in coaching wins, 9th in winning percentage (among coaches who coached at leat 500 regular season games, and 9th in playoff wins. These numbers suggest Adelman ranks among the best coaches in league history.
Despite these numbers, though, here is what Adelman thinks drives success in the baskeball:
“I had three experiences [before Houston],” he said. “At two, I had a lot of talent and at one, I didn’t. I won at two places and didn’t win at the other. I figured it out that talent is pretty important…”
I would add that in our study of NBA coaches (published with Leeds, Leeds, and Mondello and discussed in Stumbling on Wins) we did not find that players were systematically better under Adelman. This result is similar to what we found for most NBA coaches.
And before anyone mentions Tom Thibodeau (who currently has the highest winning percentage of all coaches in NBA history), let me just note the following about the 2010-11 Chicago Bulls.
- The Bulls efficiency differential (offensive efficiency minus defensive efficiency) and Wins Produced in 2010-11 is consistent with a team that would win about 61 games in a complete regular season.
- If we consider the production of the veteran players the Bulls employed this year in 2009-10, and the minutes and position played in 2010-11, we would have expected the Bulls to win about 59 games in a complete regular season.
Yes, Derrick Rose played better this year. But that may reflect Rose’s age. When it comes to coaching, it doesn’t appear that most players the Bulls employed this year are dramatically different than what they were before Thibodeau became their coach.
And one suspects, if Thibodeau keeps coaching he will eventually have a team that is less talented. When that happens, he will probably learn the very lesson Adelman taught yesterday.
Coaching simply doesn’t matter much in the NBA. And as I noted, this was also the lesson Leonhardt learned when he volunteered to serve as my coach (see how I tried to connect the two subjects of this post… once again the lack of writing talent appears :).
– DJ
Wages of Wins Journal 
A.S.
April 19, 2011
“If we consider the production of the veteran players the Bulls employed this year in 2009-10, and the minutes and position played in 2010-11, we would have expected the Bulls to win about 59 games in a complete regular season.”
Yes, but the coach controls the “minutes and positions played”. With respect to Chicago, the evidence suggests that Thibideau is doing a very good job at allocating minutes and postions to the most productive players (not a difficult job). In Houston, though, it is pretty clear that Adelman was NOT allocating minutes and positions to the most productive players. He played unproductive players like Aaron Brooks and Jordan Hill significant minutes.
Matt
April 19, 2011
“Coaching simply doesn’t matter much in the NBA. ”
That’s an incredibly bold statement. Certainly Rose’s growth as a player wasn’t exclusively because he aged a year. Certainly you can see the complex defensive systems Thibs implemented (with huge success) in both Boston and Chicago. Certainly, someone like me or you couldn’t keep Shaq/Kobe from killing each other.
Talent may be the most important aspect of an NBA team, but to say coaching “doesn’t matter” is ignorant. I should add I don’t even like the Bulls or support Adelman.
patrick
April 19, 2011
is there no effect of a coach on the allocation of minutes among more/less productive players on a given team?
Ra's Head
April 19, 2011
The statement that coaching doesn’t matter much does not mean that nba coaches could be replaced with deck chairs and everything would be fine. It means more that all NBA coaches seem to have the same level of impact, so that switching one for the other has essentially no effect on the number of wins. Of course, this is in general. There is more on this topic in Berri’s books, but I forget which one. In fact, I think I got the deck chair comparison from one of his books.
nerdnumbers
April 19, 2011
I agree with a coach ability being in doing proper minute allocation. That said here are reasons even that fails.
1. Owners/GMs decide the roster. Coaches are often subject to the desires of upper management to play certain players because of their pay/seniority (see Chauncy over Ty Lawson in Denver)
2. In order to know the right players to play a coach would have to be able to experiment with rosters, possibly with failure. However, as we’ve seen when a coach starts failing they’re more likely to get fired.
3. Even when a coach does the right minute adjustment it’s hard to see if they’re doing it right. In Detroit for instance the team is so bad that no good coaching would save it.
I think a common misconception about coaches is the power they have. The truth is when things go wrong a coach gets blamed. Most coaches will play it safe, hope for a good team and if that works then they have a career (see Avery Johnson)
Patrick Minton
April 19, 2011
As others pointed out, coaching matters in the sense that some are better than others at identifying which of their players are productive and which are not, and allocating minutes (look at Kurt Rambis in 2009-2010; he wasn’t aware that Kevin Love was his best player and only played him 27 mpg. One wonders if he would have made a similar mistake this year, had not Love’s 30/30 game put pressure on him to play Love more).
Which brings me to another point. Simply identifying your best players isn’t enough. Imagine, for instance, if Mike D’Antoni was aware that Carmelo is a pretty overrated player and only gave him role player’s minutes (assuming NY had better options at the wing, which admittedly may not be true). How long do you think he’d keep his job?
But I believe Ra’s Head has his finger on the pulse. David is not claiming “anybody could be an NBA coach”. I believe David brought up a similar point about general managers once, that picking the players you want on your team is actually only a tiny fraction of the job, and all the networking and managing that goes with the job would be far beyond most people.
brgulker
April 19, 2011
One might be able to say that a person making an argument like the one above is ignorant of the published work Dr. Berri and his colleagues have published.
Italian Stallion
April 19, 2011
I don’t think the issue is being framed properly.
It’s not that coaches don’t matter. It’s that the difference between the best and worst coach in the NBA is not very large. I can assure you that if I was coaching either the Heat or Bulls, they wouldn’t be nearly as good.
Think of the NBA with only 3 teams.
There would be so much talent on those 3 teams we’d be arguing that player’s don’t matter much either.
szr
April 19, 2011
Yeah, a more artful way of explaining this is to point out that the 30 NBA coaches may well be the 30 best basketball coaches alive today. But that is their peer group – and only a few of them seem to statistically be better than their peer group when you measure wins.
Understanding someone’s peer group is fundamental to understanding how to compare them. Sort of how Andray Blatche would absolutely kill me in a pick-up game of basketball, but I’m not in his peer group. His peer group are the 29 other starting PFs in the league, and he is worse than most (all?) of them.
Westy
April 19, 2011
It’s also interesting to note that Adelman and Morey apparently clashed over who the best players to be playing were.
As Henry at TrueHoop tweeted yesterday, “Rockets improved tons after trading away players. Adelman evidently hadn’t been playing the best guys.”
We can presume that Morey preferred Lowry to Brooks, but Adelman perhaps differed.
Jim Glass
April 19, 2011
“Coaching simply doesn’t matter much in the NBA. ”
Easy to test, run an NBA team with a high school coach, or no coach, and see the result. If coaching *really* simply doesn’t matter much we are looking at a big, expensive market failure what with teams wasting so many millions of dollars on coaching.
Much more likely what we are looking at here is what is known as Red Queen Competition in natural selection and business economics: in a highly competitive environment, where there are no institutional advantages favoring one over another, it is impossible for one competitor to gain any lasting edge on another, they will all be equal over time, by competing flat out to *just to stay in place*. But those who fail to compete flat out get eliminated, or are never good enough to get into the competition to begin with.
E.g, Bill James says baseball’s 300k game data base gives no evidence that any baseball managers have been any better at any others at winning close games — but *does* give some evidence that some managers have been worse in close games than others, even though those managers quickly disappear from the pool, so that evidence never piles up clearly.
In the business world, critics of CEO salaries often make the argument that CEOs are greatly over-paid because the evidence shows that the high paid CEOs don’t have any special ability to make more profits compared to competitors. But more astute observers note that CEOs aren’t just paid to make gains, they are very much paid to avoid losses to volatile multi-billion dollar asset holdings. And that’s worth good pay too. Those who don’t believe it may consider how quickly a new sub-par CEO can crater an Enron.
It’s one thing to say that among the very few in the basketball coaching profession who have the skill set to coach capably in the NBA, you can’t expect one to produce much more than another, because they all are extremely competitive with each other. It is an entirely different thing to say “coaching simply doesn’t matter much”, so a team could replace its HC with any schlub or nobody at all, and it wouldn’t matter much.
And which of those statements is true should be easily determined by test.
MikeMother
April 20, 2011
Wow – this is like Philosophy 101, where words get over dissected.
So lets define it:
“Coaching doesn’t matter” == “If you re interviewing for an NBA coach / choosing whether to keep one, the choice/replacement likely won’t have any real impact”.
In other words, the combination of valid choices is significant, and the pool of candidates well known and well defined.
Schermeister
April 20, 2011
It hardly matters, players run their own plays most of the time. And after say 10 years of bball experience are you saying they have no idea what they are doing but then as soon as someone leaves the nba (byron scott) then suddenly they obtain the intricate game knowledge to become a coach. Give me a break.
As for the comparisons to CEO salaries give me a break as well. That doesnt even compare. Soemhow USA CEO’s make 10 times more then their counterparts in europe. Guess thats because they are so much better. The CEo’s that cratered Enron are the same ones thats are on multiple other companies. And the CEOs’s that help crater the economy are still on board. Making rentainment bonus’s instead of regular bonus’s.
Coaches and CEO’s are similar in tht it is an old boys club. And simply a carousel that goes round and round. And just like nerd numbers says, they put their heads down and hope for a good roster. Very few coaches seem to offer little. Do you hear the guys on sideline when they are miked up. They dont say anything. And as commentators. I mean it is a bunch of utter bull.
“Play aggressive, dont foul, hard efense, go to the hole, play 110%” There we go I said all the key points
Italian Stallion
April 20, 2011
I would love to see one of the people saying that coaching doesn’t matter put their own money on the line in a bet on whether they could get the Bulls to win 60 games next year.
At the all star break, when they were below .500, IMO they would be looking for a CEO golden parachute.
Like I said, it may not matter all that much which one of the 30 coaches in the NBA is coaching the Bulls, but to argue they have no value is preposterous.
Flat Fee Tax Service
April 20, 2011
when you match a talented coach with talented players who are in tune with one another, you will see the success…a great coach will get more out of a mediocre group of players than would a marginal coach but that team will still be losers…you need committed players with loads of talent.
winniepoo
April 20, 2011
Dr Berri did not mean to say coaches aren’t necessary. Maybe he should have positioned it that coaching is not a point of differentiation in the NBA. I.e. They are more or less the same whereas player talent and production fluctuates massively from team to team.
This was the take out we got from the books and a few blog posts where only a handful of coaches over NBA history actually improve player performance on a consistent basis.
Sam Cohen
April 20, 2011
IS- if you can convince the Bulls (or any other NBA team) to hire me as their coach, I’d be happy to take that bet. It’d need to be a pretty substantial bet for the cost (assuming I lost) to not be worth the experience of being an NBA head coach…
More seriously, I do think that one of the most important things a coach can do (after proper minute allocation) is convincing all of the players to follow the system they implement (regardless of which system it is). And having the respect of the players (by virtue of playing experience, years as a successful assistant, etc.) is probably key to getting the players to follow your system. A random person will probably have a very hard time getting the players to “buy-in,” so that person probably won’t be successful.
Xavier Q
April 21, 2011
I think what he’s trying to say is, most NBA coaches do about the same job. There are coaches who the numbers work out to be better at their job (Phil Jackson) and there must surely be ones that are worse. This year alone, the 76ers and the Pacers have proved that while coaching may not make players better, they can certain hold players back.
brgulker
April 21, 2011
I really wish people would read the research before commenting. If you do, it becomes clear exactly what DB intends above. Most coaches don’t significantly impact the performance of players. Hence, coaching doesn’t matter much.
Nathan Walker
April 22, 2011
So coaches only add the magical points that lead to wins, but not the less-magical points that only lead to ‘efficiency differential’? This is nonsense.
And to say that player production from the past predicting player production in the future means “coaches don’t matter that much” is to assume first that player production in the past was not impacted by coaching in the first place.