With the country’s biggest election and voting just about to happen, the NBA GM’s weighed in with some voting of their own.
The NBA released the answers to a GM survey they took on the league’s coaches.
Best coach – Gregg Popovich 53.8%
Phil Jackson 23.1%
Jerry Sloan 7.7%
I have no problem with the top choices. But Doc Rivers should have, at least, appeared on the radar.
Rick Adelman ‘received votes’. Though leading the biggest team turnaround in league history, Doc Rivers did not get a single vote (as mentioned) for best coach. Even Stan Van Gundy, Rick Carlisle, and Nate McMillan got votes. It hardly seems right. Call it the Joe Torre syndrome. Nice guy coaches big stars = easy. We know now that isn’t so easy…..don’t we?
I would like to see what Phil Jackson could do with the teams Doc Rivers had the previous 2 seasons. In fact, I’d like to see what Gregg Popovich would do with such limited talent. I happen to agree that Popovich may be the best coach in the league, but again, Tim Duncan is a very coachable superstar and a leader in his own right – not unlike Garnett.
Both Popovich and Sloan are quite impressive when encountered in person. The phrase “professional, but accessible” comes to mind. and they will try to give you a straight answer to your questions. Not that has anything to do with coaching ability. But maybe it does, in some small way.
Between deciding how to structure the offense, to deciding that defense would be stressed, to making sure the big three got plenty of minutes early to limiting their minutes as the year went, Doc did a great job. His teams are loyal and play hard every year. The three stars got just about the same amount of shots each (not a coincidence) and he developed a young point guard, and 2 talented power forwards along the way. He also tried to negotiate a happy medium with late season addition Sam Cassell.
Doc did gets props as the 3rd best motivator (12%), behind Jackson (44%) and Popovich (28%). Again, I think that’s a bit low in light of the final results last year.
There was a watershed moment in the survey in that Doc was picked by 8% (tied for 4th) as making the best in-game adjustments. That was often an area of criticism by some in the past.
Rivers was second (38%) only to Popovich (50%) for best defensive schemes. But a large part of the credit goes to Tom Thibodeau, who was received the most votes for top assistant coach with 41.7%. Well done on both parts. In fact, I don’t know how Doc (and Tom) doesn’t get voted number one for defensive schemes. No team was better over the course of the season.
In an interesting rating, Eric Snow was voted top active player (24%) who would make a great head coach one day. The Celtics’ own Sam Cassell was 2nd with 16% of the vote.
I’m not unhappy with Doc’s respect, but I thought it should be higher in most cases. I guess Doc still has something to prove as much as the team does, to get top respect around the league. We will learn some new things about both this season.
