Who is the best Coach?

[ziggy]

I don't want to get into an arguement about Jackson.  He has 9 titles, so he is at the top of the heep.  Who is the next best and why?

[WayOutWest]

Put PJ on the list, I'd still vote for Riley.

He's as knowledgeable as any of them.  Makes adjustments better than any of them because he makes them at every level (i.e. possesion, quarter, half, game & series).  He's a great motivator, instills a great work ethic.  Knows both ends of the court and doesn't need 20+ assistants.  In my basketball life-time I haven't seen a coach as complete as Riley, he has no weakness, next closest is Chuck Daily and Jerry Sloan.

F the rest of those pretendors!

[spursfan101]

Dude, if your talking Coach of the Year...then without question, its

HUBIE BROWN.

[Joe Vancil]

Of the ones up there, I chose Flip Saunders.  Year in, year out, the guy does a bang-up job with Garnett and scraps.  This year, he's got players, and he's winning his division.  Year after year, more folks steal from his playbook than from any other.  

Personally, my take is the Riley is awfully good, but only when he's got a big center and a top-notch point guard.  Rick Carlisle is good;  Lenny Wilkens needs top-level guards to be good.  Nelson's an innovator, but that translates to sometimes, he's really really good, and sometimes, he's really really bad.  Popovich is a terrible coach.  Adelman is great at getting headcases integrated, but I don't consider him a superior strategy guy.  Larry Brown is a good coach, but incapable of sustaining a team for very long, and has a personality that grates on his players.  Paul Silas is good as a leader and a rallying point, but I started to question him as a coach given how well New Orleans started off this year.  

Personally, though, I'd take Sloan over any of them.  His players overachieve.  That means he's doing something right in terms of team-building.  Utah is 34-34.  I didn't give Utah a chance in hell of winning 25 games, much less 34.  They might actually finish over .500.  That's impressive.

Hubie Brown actually out-coached Sloan in the game I went to.  I like what Hubie is doing, but I think Hubie does need to tighten his line-up a bit.  Gasol needs a few more minutes than he's getting.

[Laker Fan]

You guys know I love Riley, no one motivates and drives a team like he does, no one has his intensity and pure knowledge of the game, his teams leave it on the floor every night, he gets my vote for best coach period.

But of the best that are currently coaching, while no one has had more quick success than Hubie this year, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is doing more with less than (I can't believe I'm saying this) Jerry Sloan, it is a travesty that you left him off this poll Ziggy!

[JoMal]

Besides leaving off Sloan and Hubie Brown, where is Bzdelik of Denver?

Of those on the list, I would give best coaching honors to Carlisle, followed by Riley. While I know there is a large contingent of Patty followers on this board, his tendency to overwork his charges eventually leads to mutany and dissatisfaction. That, plus he really does not treat the players as men, but as being less important then him. You can't be a great coach without gaining the respect of your players, but he still gets his charges to perform up to that point.

Sloan, on the hand, gets both success and respect, and no one would call him a wallflower of a coach. Carlisle, to me, manages to instill a work ethic in his players that seems to breed success at every turn. Hubie Brown has simply done the impossible in Memphis. Bzdelik deserves some of the credit for turning the Nuggets around.

Phil Jackson can manage massive egos and the psychological game as well as anyone, but he is more known for coaching megastars in the League then for developing young teams into success. Hard to judge him on those merits.

Closer to home, Adelman appears to be a great practice coach who trains his team to perfection off the court. But once the game begins, he has no idea what to do if his plan does not work and relies on his players to figure it out. Also, for having the deepest bench in the League, he has a tendency to ignore parts of it in games where some of those guys would clearly be an improvement over who he allows to play. When Bobby Jackson or Chris Webber is shooting 1 for 20, maybe it is time to try another player out there.

[Laker Fan]

I have never been of the opinion Phil Jackson is anything other than a right place right time, ride soemone elses talent kind of coach. He would be nowhere if he hadn't had Tex Winter at his side to develop the triangle and Michael Jordan to work it to perfection. In LA he has had the luxury of 2, now 4 superstars to hitch a ride with. I do not believe for minute this guy could build a team from scratch.

Pat Riley is probably the best situational strategist to ever coach in the NBA, he always knows who will work best in any given situation and understands the X's and O's to a degree that is legendary, he could manufacture wins out of thin air it seemed. Joe Vancil is correct, however, he always seemed to need at least a quality point guard and either a very good forward or center to make it work. But whether the team has quality or not, he will still squeeze every ounce out of every player every time they step on the court. Personally, I think his "my way or the highway" work ethic and discipline requirements are a philosophies sorely lacking in this "I'm a starter" selfish era of NBA players. He made good players great, and great players legends. He took no nonsense and every one who played for him, whether they liked him or not, knew they were better because of him.

Hubie Brown is phenominal which makes Jerry West's legendary genius grow even more by the day, he took a man that has been out of coaching for something like 200 years and brought him into a situation where failure was easily on the horizon and look at what Brown has done with Memphis! Granted he has some decent talent there, Jason the overrated showboat idiot Williams notwithstanding, but no real star and in fact only 2 players (Outlaw and Wright) have more than 5 years in the league, incredible! How Hubie has been able to coach this very young team in an era quite different from what he was used to is testament to his quality, as person and a coach.

Jerry Sloan has made a believer out of me, his biggest critic. Whether Joe agrees or not, he has always had the same luxury Phil Jackson had, mega star talent at the point and at power forward. Let no one tell you otherwise, John Stockton would have been the player he became no matter where he played, Sloan IMO had little to do with that, same with Malone, and you can't discount the high quality role players he had when they kept bumping up against Chicago, Hornicek with his deadly shooting and Carr with his big physical defense. Even with the cast he had, Sloan makes some real bonehead decisisons come crunch time and his situational substitutions still confound me, but I'll be darned if he has hasn't pulled off a miracle this year. He loses his only real name player before the season is half done and he puts a bunch of no names on the court day in and day out in the brutal Western Conference and he has this team at 34-34, on the cusp of making the playoffs, and the only legitimate star he has is Andre Kirilenko! He's done more wtih less this year than any coach I can think of. I humbly eat crow in the face of what he is doing this year.

Mo Cheeks has potential, but he needs to get out of Portland.

[ziggy]

Once again I aplogize for the bonehead of leaving someone off.  Sloan and Hubie should be on the list.  Hard to always remember everybody.

[Randy]

I USED to be a huge Riley fan but he has destroyed his team -- not just as a GM but also as a coach.  Are his workouts too demanding?  I think in this day and age they are.  Players are going to suffer more injuries under Riles than most coaches just because of his workout regiment.  I think it was fine when Mourning was there to act as the "general" but without him, he just lost the ability to communicate with his players.  

I am a HUGE Rick Carlisle fan (yeah, I know -- big surprise to everyone here).  I know last year guys were saying, "it's this assistant coach -- it's that assistant coach" but people need to stop and give Carlisle his due.  Not only is he a great X's and O's coach -- but he took a team with the most T's in the NBA last year and wildly inconsistent and made them one of the most consistent teams in the NBA.  I love his offensive and defensive schemes.  Also, how many T's does Artest have?  How many practices has he missed?  Carlisle is a hardnosed coach who does it in a way that players respect.  You HAVE to love this guy as a coach.  

I would also have to give props to Jerry Sloan and Hubie Brown -- two other coaches who deserve to be considered as COY.  Sloan is working with less than any other team in the NBA, IMO, and he STILL is finding a way to win.  Sloan has made Matt Harpring look like an All-Star -- that deserves COY mention, all by itself.  Hubie has done a phenomenal job in Memphis TEACHING his players how to play as a unit.  His work with JWill alone deserves COY honors.  He STILL has a lot of work cut out for him (he has to try and get Gasol focused on the defensive end).  

I would also like to give honorable mention to Bzdelik of Denver and Frank of NJ for their work respectively.  Very deserving of what they have accomplished.

I would have put Adelmann in the nod but while I LOVE the motion offense that he uses, I hate the fact that he throws it away with CWebb steps on the floor.  Also, he is so focused on his game plans that he doesn't seem to be able to respond to the opposite coaches gameplan within the game.  He can do that after games but he seems to have things planted so firmly in his mind that he can't change it in midstream even if it's not working.  I think the perfect example of this is the Kings present situation.  Work CWebb in but don't kill what you have accomplished.  Use the motion defense at times WITH CWebb on the floor and don't run the offense through him.  This will keep teams guessing and running to keep up rather than able to devise a gameplan that they know is going to work with the CWebb offense.

I wouldn't put PJ in a COY -- ESPECIALLY for this year.  PJ likes playing games and has done that all too well this year.  People outside of LA get upset at PJ's mind games but he plays those same games with his own players.  We all know that Tex is the genius behind the Lakers triangle but the Lakers lack of D at this point rests on PJ's shoulders and somehow he doesn't seem as upset with it as I think he should.  PJ has deserved COY mention in the past when he managed to get the Lakers to play as a team -- so far he hasn't managed that this year for very many games -- and time is ticking.  Time for SuperPJ, huh?  That's enough to make me sick -- just another way of showing everyone how "great" he is.  I like the coaches (like Carlisle, Sloan, Brown, etc. who desire to let their team speak for their coaching abilities.

[westkoast]

Wow Joe Id thought you would have went with Sloan.  He should be close to the top of active coaches IMO.  People sometimes only look at winning records when judging a coach.  Jerry has done a nice job after loosing 2 franchise players.  Cant wait to see the Jazz live when they come to the staples center at the end of the month.

Hubie is my pick for this year.  He has done a great job.  Flip too but Hubie is doing alot with less.

Riley was a great coach and a good motivator.....with players who had hard working mentalities.  His coaching style is excellent for players who have that drive (Magic, Worthy, Scott, Rambis, Cooper, etc etc) but not for those new age pre maddona players that are floating around the league.  KG, Kobe, Duncan, Madsen, Rose, Boykins, and others (I know I am forgetting alot) would be excellent in Miami with him.