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 never actually know.
So what are we ranking? Here are the major categories we can evaluate at least somewhat fairly:
- Track record. This is obvious. A great coach tends to win a lot of games in the regular season and advance deep into the postseason.
- Performance against expectations. Sometimes, a great coach is stricken with a limited roster. Can he make lemonade out of those lemons? Some coaches happen to consistently find themselves with elite talent. What does it say about them if they can’t make the most of it?
- Points of emphasis. Do your teams take the right kinds of shots? Do they allow the right kinds of shots? Do you have ways of generating turnovers without excessive fouling? Do you balance rebounding and transition on both ends of the floor? Essentially, is your team doing the right things on paper? Are you plucking the low-hanging fruit?
- Creativity. Have you found unorthodox uses for under-valued players? Are there things that you do that other coaches don’t? Can you draw up a nice out-of-bounds play?
- Player development. Do your draft picks pan out? Do you find productive players on the margins? Do players leave your team and get better? Do players leave your team and get worse?
- Rotation management. Are you playing the right players? Are you overusing your best players? Are you underusing them? Do you have specific lineup quirks that help or hurt your team consistently?
- People management. Do your players like you? Do they play hard for you? Are you operating in lockstep with your GM? Are you constantly battling with ownership? Can you manage the politics of your locker room?
There is no set rubric here. We’re not ranking the coaches in each category. But these are loosely the things we’ll be evaluating in ranking these coaches. So with that in mind, let’s dive in.
Tier 9: We don’t know enough
30. JJ Redick, Lakers
29. Brian Keefe, Wizards
28. Charles Lee, Hornets
27. Jordi Fernandez, Nets
26. Darko Rajakovic, Raptors
No, I am not prepared to offer a strong opinion on the coaching future of a podcaster. There just isn’t enough data to say much of anything here. Redick takes the bottom spot purely on lack of experience. Keefe underwhelmed as Washington’s interim last season. Lee and Fernandez are widely respected assistants, but they’ve still never done this before. Rajakovic has one tanking season on the job. Check back with me in a year and I’ll have something to say.
Tier 8: I wouldn’t be enthused
25. Chauncey Billups, Trail Blazers
24. Billy Donovan, Bulls
23. JB Bickerstaff, Pistons
22. Doc Rivers, Bucks
Chauncey Billups might fall into the “never had the right players” group of coaches who didn’t succeed but may never have had a chance. That said, his Blazers tenure has been discouraging. His teams have developed no discernible on-court identity and he’s made some bizarre strategic choices when he has had veterans to work with (using Robert Covington as a man-to-man defender instead of a helper, for instance, and indulging Deandre Ayton’s mid-range fixation more than Monty Williams ever did). He’s very much coaching for his job this season, considering he isn’t under contract afterward.
Billy Donovan has been boxed in by his rosters to an extent. You only get to play a certain way when you have Russell Westbrook, and Chicago’s uninspiring collection of veterans hasn’t given him much room for creativity. He was great in his last season in Oklahoma City, utilizing unconventional three-point guard lineups with Chris Paul, Dennis Schroder and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, but he never matched that ingenuity otherwise. His Bulls teams take the wrong shots and do little to inspire much optimism.
JB Bickerstaff’s teams tend to start out hot, fade down the stretch and underwhelm in the postseason. His Cleveland teams were consistently good on defense, but how much of that was him? He had one of the best defensive front courts in the NBA in Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen. The reporting surrounding his exit was dispiriting. He’d clearly lost the locker room in Cleveland. Perhaps he’ll do better in Detroit, but his offenses have always been relatively stagnant, and that’s a big problem on a roster with so little shooting.
Doc Rivers had Chris Paul and Blake Griffin. He had Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. He had Joel Embiid and James Harden. He never reached the conference finals with any of them. It’s been a long time since 2008. His players clearly like playing for him, and he is perhaps the best job interviewer among current coaches. Owners love him. That’s probably how he keeps getting these premium jobs. But he also keeps blowing playoff leads, over-relying on name-brand veterans, punting on offensive rebounds and running predictable offenses. Hiring Doc Rivers looks better in a press release than employing Doc Rivers tends to actually work out on the court.
Tier 7: You look promising, but it’s still a tad early
21. Kenny Atkinson, Cavaliers
20. Willie Green, Pelicans
19. Jamahl Mosley, Magic
Kenny Atkinson was great at leading a team with no expectations. The Nets did all of the procedural stuff right. They took good shots. They designed pick-and-rolls that set up the right players. They defended hard. And then Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving arrived and Atkinson was gone before they played a game together. Was this two mercurial personalities overwhelming the organization? Or does Atkinson still need to prove he can manage a locker room? We’ll find out on a Cleveland team that expects to win right away, and as we learned in the reporting surrounding Bickerstaff’s ouster, is not short on internal drama.
Willie Green is hard to judge on a number of levels. Zion Williamson has barely been healthy. The roster is unconventional to say the least. The Pelicans have been great at developing players, but so much of what has gone right for them has just been their ability to turn non-shooters into good shooters. Fred Vinson is the best shooting coach in the NBA, and Fred Vinson now works for the Pistons. There’s a lot to like here. Green is creative, especially on defense, where he’s helped Herb Jones carve out an ambitious niche as the only player in the league who legitimately takes primary assignments against both point guards and centers. The Pelicans were one of the best teams in the NBA last season between CJ McCollum’s injury and Brandon Ingram’s. We just need to see it play out of a full season and a couple of playoff rounds before we push him any higher.
Jamahl Mosley took one of the youngest teams in the NBA last season and made it a defensive juggernaut. Yes, the talent in Orlando is well-suited to that, but getting young players to buy in defensively is harder than it looks. This isn’t just the Jalen Suggs and Jonathan Isaac show. There are versions of Paolo Banchero’s career in which he’s indifferent on that end of the floor. Mosley has him working hard despite carrying the entire offensive load. That offense has a ways to go. There signs of promise here. The Magic grade surprisingly well in basically every setting following a stoppage (after timeouts and general out-of-bounds plays). But Orlando still isn’t good on offense. If Mosley can overcome the shooting and ball-handling limitations on that roster, though, he’s going to skyrocket up this list.
Tier 6: Middle of the road
18. Jason Kidd, Mavericks
17. Taylor Jenkins, Grizzlies
16. Quin Snyder, Hawks
15. Michael Malone, Nuggets
Jason Kidd runs so hot and cold. He arrives in Brooklyn days after retiring and leaves after a failed coup. The Bucks over-perform when he arrives, but he refuses to adjust and has to watch them soar after his departure. He leads the Mavericks to two great seasons and one bizarre lottery year in between. Kidd has grown more flexible schematically in Dallas, and didn’t get nearly enough credit for the great work he did in the 2022 postseason, specifically, in which he completely outmaneuvered Monty Williams in a second-round upset. Last season’s playoff run was much more a function of Nico Harrison’s masterful job of rebuilding the roster. Oklahoma City completely defined the terms of engagement in the second round. The Minnesota series had much more to do with inherent mismatches and Luka Doncic’s late-game dominance. Kidd appears to be the right coach for Dallas right now. He doesn’t get in Doncic’s way and he’s gotten far better at scheming up defenses, mixing in more traditional coverages with the more out-there concepts he ran in Milwaukee. But his track record remains too spotty for an especially high rank.
Our next two coaches both come from the Mike Budenholzer tree, which means they’ve both boiled the regular season down to a science. Taylor Jenkins led the Grizzlies to back-to-back No. 2 seeds. Snyder’s work in Utah speaks for itself. But neither has had much playoff success, though injuries have ruined Jenkins’ chances. Snyder teams tend to be a bit crisper on offense — not exactly creative, but impeccably precise in their pick-and-roll execution. Jenkins has had to do a bit more defensively. It turns out “save us Rudy” is only a viable scheme for the team that employs Rudy Gobert, and the Hawks obviously do not. The Grizzlies are great at developing talent, but their front office’s distinct drafting style plays a significant role there. Snyder’s longer track record gives him the edge.
Evaluating Malone is especially difficult because… well… Jokic. Malone deserves far more credit than he gets for empowering Jokic. Not a lot of coaches would turn their offense over to a second-year No. 42 overall pick playing center. Malone did. But what happened after is much more about Jokic than anything any coach could have done. Did anybody coach Mozart? Would we care if someone had? He’s one of a kind, and succeeding with him is instinctual. Coaching plays a role, but ultimately the two-man game between him and Jamal Murray or the alley-oop telepathy he shares with Aaron Gordon is about the chemistry he’s developed with them through trial and error. This is not a case of Steve Kerr and Stephen Curry, when a coach arrived and devised a system that allowed a once-in-a-lifetime player to be his best self where previous coaches had failed. Jokic would be Jokic anywhere. He’s literally never played with an All-Star. And judging Malone outside of Jokic is almost impossible. We do know he’s devised defenses that have tended to outperform their talent, especially lately. We also know that he’s a very old school coach that struggles to trust young players, which is causing some friction with his front office at the moment. For now, we’ll say he’s a good coach, and the right one for a Denver team that has achieved more success with him than it ever did without. But given the Jokic factor, it feels unfair to put him near the top of such a crowded list.
Tier 5: The living legend
14. Gregg Popovich, Spurs
I have said consistently that I believe Gregg Popovich is the greatest basketball coach that has ever lived. I am not wavering from that stance one bit. His contributions to the game cannot be limited to a single blurb. Attach any superlative to him that you want. He deserves it. He’s also been coaching the Spurs for almost 30 years. The game has changed a lot in that time, and we’re ranking the best coaches in the sport today. Popovich’s recent performance leaves plenty of room to believe that he’s declined a bit from his peak. Consider the following:
- He hasn’t won a playoff series since 2017.
- His teams fairly consistently rank near the bottom of the league in 3-point attempts, though in fairness they’ve trended upward in recent years.
- He’s made some pretty bizarre strategic decisions lately. Remember when Jeremy Sochan was their starting point guard last season? That might have been more of a long-term developmental ploy that was never meant to stick (that came with the added bonus of enforcing a tank), but it also more or less wasted the beginning of last season. It shouldn’t have taken until January to realize how badly Victor Wembanyama needed Tre Jones.
- For two decades, Popovich had Tim Duncan to essentially serve as his avatar both on the court and in the locker room. Nobody ever acted out in San Antonio because Duncan set the example not to. Popovich could coach everyone on the team as hard as he wanted to because Duncan let him coach him that way. He retired in 2016. By 2018, Kawhi Leonard was gone and LaMarcus Aldridge had asked for a trade. Popovich is widely praised — and justifiably so! — for the relationships he is able to forge with his players. He’s viewed as one of the NBA’s best human beings. It’s also fair to wonder how many of his tactics worked specifically because he had Duncan and not a more typical superstar. Did he attempt to forge similar working relationships with Aldridge and Leonard and run into problems that never would have arisen with Duncan? Duncan was not only irreplaceable, but of a different generation, and we don’t quite now Popovich would handle a modern contender because he hasn’t really had one. What happened with Leonard and Aldridge was far, far more complicated than a coaching failure. It’s just that we mostly brush over those failings as outliers when Duncan was probably an outlier as well.
If you want to grandfather Popovich into the No. 1 spot eternally, well, I won’t stop you. He might even be underrated historically. But there are coaches I’d consider better attuned to the modern sport than he is.
Tier 4: Obvious floor-raisers
13. Mike Brown, Kings
12. Chris Finch, Timberwolves
11. Joe Mazzulla, Celtics
10. Tom Thibodeau, Knicks
9. Mike Budenholzer, Suns
8. Ime Udoka, Rockets
Mike Brown teams are always better defensively than they have any right to be. The Kings were somehow above average on that end of the floor last season when their only major defensive plus — Keon Ellis — was in and out of the rotation until March. He clearly picked up some offensive tricks during his time with the Warriors as well, though the league had seemingly caught up to a lot of Sacramento’s hand-offs and tempo-based offense last season. This season will be a major test. DeMar DeRozan is a tricky fit on this roster. If Brown makes it work, he could be a top-10 coach.
Chris Finch made it onto the radar of casual NBA fans last season, when Minnesota reached the Western Conference finals. His best work came in 2022, when he devised an unconventional, swarming, trapping defense that took advantage of Karl-Anthony Towns‘ mobility and hid his failings as a rim-protector. When Rudy Gobert arrived and the Timberwolves needed to play more traditionally, Finch got his entire roster to buy into that as well. He’s succeeded with multiple styles. He’s one of the NBA’s more creative coaches, and he even had a hand in Jokic’s early ascent in Denver. He doesn’t have the track record yet, but he’s on a top-10 trajectory.
Joe Mazzulla is another “hard to judge” coach. His roster is flawless, what are we supposed to do with him? Fans wanted him fired after his first season. He’s mostly sanded away the game-management issues that led to that skepticism, and having a properly stocked bench of assistant coaches makes much more of a difference than you see on television. He took over an incredibly difficult position in 2022, struggled through his debut, and then put it all together last season. The Celtics are the NBA’s most prolific shooting team. Mazzulla believes in firing away from deep and he has the players to execute that system. If anything, you could argue Boston is a bit too dogmatic about shot-selection. Every now and then you need to know that the 3s aren’t falling and have a few pivots ready. Only time will tell how this approach will age as the roster regresses to something closer to a traditional contender, but Mazzulla replaced an incredibly popular coach and made the team his own on both ends of the floor. We can’t call him a great coach yet just because of his roster, but he did almost everything right even in that context last season.
Tom Thibodeau is the best coach in the NBA for Tom Thibodeau players. Unfortunately, Tom Thibodeau players are rare in the 2024 NBA. Fortunately, the Knicks have many of them. Tom Thibodeau is not a versatile coach. His teams play the way they play. He asks more out of his starters than any other coach in basketball. His defenses protect the basket at all costs. His teams own the glass on both ends. And when he has the personnel for that? He’s awesome. He just has to get dinged for his specificity. He has a roster full of players in New York that would run through a brick wall for him and then pick themselves up and eat the rubble just for the fun of it. Josh Harts don’t grow on trees. Still, give the credit for his offenses. For someone who is practically the textbook model of “old-school coach,” his teams are appropriately modern in terms of shot-selection. Though not elite in any single area, they were above average in 3s, rim looks and free throws last season.
Mike Budenholzer and the Suns might be the perfect match of team and coach. Phoenix took all of the wrong shots last season. Budenholzer teams only take layups and 3s. Budenholzer teams are bad at scoring late in games. The Suns have Kevin Durant and Devin Booker. Phoenix has no defensive personnel. Budenholzer runs the most vanilla defense in basketball, but does it so well and so consistently that it’s basically impossible for his teams to hover very far from league average on that end of the floor. Budenholzer underuses his best players. Phoenix’s best players are injury-prone and should probably play less. Both coach and roster have flaws, but they cover one another up. Both coach and roster have specific gifts, and in this case, they mesh perfectly.
Ime Udoka has coached two NBA seasons for two different teams. Adjust for an 82-game schedule and those two teams combined to improve by 29 total wins. It’s not always pretty at first. He’ll openly criticize his players to the media, for example, and he has very discerning taste in players (good luck seeing the floor if you’re not going to defend). But on the court, he’s done just about everything right. He turned Robert Williams III into a Defensive Player of the Year candidate by playing to his strengths and making him a weak-side rover rather than a traditional rim-protector. He handed his offense over to Alperen Sengun when Stephen Silas wouldn’t. When Sengun got hurt, Udoka reinvented the Rockets on the fly by playing rookie guard Amen Thompson at center on offense and handing the keys to Jalen Green. Udoka walks the tightrope between intense accountability and boundless creativity as well as practically any coach in the NBA. He’s old-school demanding with every modern strategic twist you could ask for. He’s destined for a top-five spot on this list. He just hasn’t been around long enough yet to get there, and considering how little we know about what cost him his job in Boston, a little apprehension is warranted.
Tier 3: The Wunderkinds
7. Will Hardy, Jazz
6. Mark Daigneault, Thunder
Picking Hardy over Udoka is probably going to be unpopular. They both have two years of experience. They were the two lead voices on the 2022 Eastern Conference champion Celtics. But Udoka’s teams have experienced far more success. Of course, it’s worth noting that Udoka’s teams have actually been trying to win. The past two Utah Jazz seasons have been the story of a coach preventing a general manager from tanking. He turned Lauri Markkanen into a star. He’s built enormously successful lineups out of spare parts. He went 13-7 with his proper starting lineup, and then Danny Ainge traded Simone Fontecchio (and several important reserves) away, folding up yet another pleasantly surprising campaign. Hardy has a lot in common with the next coach on this list, who happens to be the reigning Coach of the Year. He started his career on a rebuilder, but the brilliance is there if you’re looking for it. The Jazz are prepared for every game they play. He mixes and matches his players and finds unorthodox lineup combinations that outperform their talent. In a few years, the Jazz will be where the Thunder are: loaded with talent and draft picks and getting Hardy in the Coach of the Year mix.
As we just covered, Daigneault actually did win Coach of the Year last season. This is just a matter of track record. The five coaches ahead of him are champions who have all succeeded with multiple roster constructions. Daigneault is going to get there some day, but he hasn’t been to the conference finals yet. Still, his playoff debut was encouraging. Oklahoma City dispatched the overmatched Pelicans with ease, and even though the Thunder lost to Dallas, they still dictated the playing style of the series. They decided Dallas would win or lose on corner 3s, and the Mavericks ultimately just made more of them than the Thunder could have expected. The Thunder were one of only two teams (alongside Boston) to finish in the top five in both offensive and defensive rating last season. They were the youngest No. 1 seed ever. They were by far the NBA’s best “after timeout” offense last season, beating everyone else out by nearly two points per 100 possessions. Most importantly, Daigneault has shown he is willing to make the tough decisions that define coaching tenures. Josh Giddey was a full-time starter for three years. Daigneault was willing to bench him when the Mavericks forced him to. He is a possible long-term successor to the No. 1 coach on this list. For now though, he still has to prove it.
Tier 2: The elites
5. Ty Lue, Clippers
4. Steve Kerr, Warriors
3. Rick Carlisle, Pacers
2. Nick Nurse, 76ers
Ty Lue can be a frustrating coach. Few coaches are better at making adjustments than he is, but those same adjustments so often leave you asking why he didn’t just start a series out that way. He’ll talk about having a plan to fix a broken defense but saving it for the playoffs rather than allowing his players to build habits over time. He’ll turn the Clippers into a 26-5 juggernaut, but not until he’s wasted a couple of weeks starting Russell Westbrook next to James Harden. That’s the essence of the Lue experience. He gets to the right place, just not as quickly as you’d hope. Still, he almost always gets there eventually. He’s an offensive genius. The Clippers are among the best after-timeout teams in the NBA because he’s so great at drawing up plays. He’s also about as respected by his players as any coach can be. You know you have locker room credibility when you can get away with telling LeBron James to “shut the f— up.” It’s rarely ever smooth with Lue, but when the dust settles, his teams almost always do better than they should. He broke the Utah Jazz with Terence Mann. He slayed the 73-win Warriors. For all of the foibles, Lue remains one of the NBA’s very best coaches.
Speaking of foibles, this is a pro-Steve Kerr space. Warriors fans want Steve Kerr to be normal. They want him to run 40 Stephen Curry pick-and-rolls per game at the expense of the unique playing style that made them four-time champions. Yes, Kerr could stand to take the obvious approach a bit more often. And no, he’s probably not decisive enough about his rotation. Jayson Tatum aside, he stands by Golden State’s strength in numbers philosophy, and if that means playing 11 players or giving Anderson Varejao Finals minutes, then so be it. But Kerr’s role in what might be the NBA’s last dynasty for quite some time cannot be understated.
It would be easy to look at the beautiful game ball-movement offense he devised as an obvious tactic for a roster with Stephen Curry and Draymond Green, but Mark Jackson had the same players and led an offense that finished last in the league in passes per game. If Curry ran pick-and-rolls at the same rate peak James Harden did he’d be just another star ball-handler. Kerr turned him into a unicorn. He weaponized Curry’s shooting with off-ball movement that no other guard has ever been able to replicate. He did the same for Green on defense, embracing switching as a base concept years before anyone else did it. His playoff adjustments are legendary. Go read up on what he did to Tony Allen in 2015. He’s humble enough to credit a lowly special assistant with the lineup change that swung the 2015 Finals. That is the essence of Kerr. A basketball genius so open-minded that he’ll try any idea from any source if he thinks it’s the right idea. That he’s managed Draymond Green without losing the locker room completely for a full decade is almost enough to automatically give him a top-four slot.
Rick Carlisle is demanding. He asks more out of his ball-handlers than any other coach in basketball, and that rubs certain players the wrong way. There’s a whiff of Thibodeau in here. Some players just aren’t Rick Carlisle players. Where they differ most significantly is in flexibility. Carlisle is probably the NBA’s most creative coach. In Dallas he had a No. 1 offense that ranked 18th in pace. In Indiana he just finished No. 2 with the NBA’s second-fastest team. He’s coaching a roster with very little defensive talent? No problem. He’ll devise a scheme that sacrifices everything at the rim for the sake of walling off the 3-point line, because hey, no matter who you have, you can always stop something. Carlisle’s 2021 series against Lue was an adjustments master class, with each getting crazier and crazier by the game just to match one another. By Game 7, Boban Marjanovic was playing 31 minutes while the Clippers had all but abandoned traditional big men. That’s what you get with a Carlisle teams. Bespoke strategies tailored entirely to the roster and opponent he has at that specific moment. He never found his Tom Brady, but in that sense, Carlisle is almost the NBA’s Bill Belichick.
What Carlisle is to offense, Nurse is to defense. How many coaches would think to bust out a triangle-and-2 defense to stifle Stephen Curry in the Finals? Nick Nurse. End of list. One of the advantages of coming up as a coach in Belgium and Britain and the G-League is that Nurse was exposed to so many different players and styles that when he did ultimately get the top job, he had a far wider pool of strategies to reference in high-stress situations. He’s seen everything, and by this point, he’s used everything. Nurse, at his core, is a problem solver. Whatever you show him on the court, he’s going to have some idea about how to stop it, and the results thus far have spoken for themselves. He lost Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green and his Raptors still maintained the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference. Joel Embiid played his best basketball under Nurse last season despite winning an MVP under Rivers. He’s lucky Thibodeau exists, because his reputation for overusing starters probably doesn’t go quite far enough, but in matters of strategy, Nurse is almost unmatched. Emphasis on almost.
Tier 1: The undisputed king
1. Erik Spoelstra, Heat
Erik Spoelstra has coached in 34 playoff series. He has been the lower seed in 18 of those series. Care to guess how many times Erik Spoelstra teams have fallen behind in a series 2-0? Three times. That’s right. All three came either in the NBA Finals or against a team that reached the NBA Finals. One came with two injured starters (the 2020 NBA Finals). Another featured a two-point overtime loss on the road. So why does any of this matter? Because it shows just how impeccably well-prepared every Erik Spoelstra team is for the playoffs. No matter who he’s playing or who is on his own roster, he always finds some way to catch his opponents off guard.
Every other coach on this list has distinct strengths and weaknesses. If Spoelstra has a weakness, it’s not readily apparent. I guess his teams don’t take quite as many 3s as they should, but that has more to do with his rosters than strategy, and they make up for it by playing the sort of egalitarian offense most coaches dream of. Whether it’s first-round picks or undrafted free agents, no team does a better job of developing its talent than Miami, and no team’s free agents fall off after leaving quite as often as Miami’s do. He’s navigated several tricky locker rooms — LeBron James seemingly tried to get Pat Riley to replace him — yet the fabled Heat culture has never been compromised. He incorporates zone defense as a strategic changeup more than any other coach in basketball, and it’s been a consistently successful trump card.
Could you credit Pat Riley for developing both Spoelstra as a coach and the organizational culture that he inherited? Sure. The Heat are not a one-man operation. But as we’ve covered, there’s no such thing when it comes to coaches. Spoelstra plays the hand he’s dealt just like any other coach, and whether he has a James-led super team or a Dion Waiters and James Johnson-led group of misfits, he unquestionably gets the most out of what he has. That’s all we can ask of a coach.
