The Era of Collective Competence for NBA coaches and general managers

In which we Remember Some Ineffective Guys.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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The Beach Near Trouville; Eugene Boudin; 1865

Another day, another GMIB newsletter in the NBA offseason doldrums reacting to a list someone made. CBS Sports’ Sam Quinn ranked all 30 NBA head coaches, putting Gregg Popovich in the middle of the pack and Erik Spoelstra at No. 1. Fair enough. The key takeaway to me isn’t where this or that coach placed, it’s that most NBA head coaches are perfectly fine.

This extends beyond the sidelines, though: a running theme in recent years has been that most front offices are now pretty well-respected. It’s hard to find a general manager working in the NBA that is a true laughingstock. Most NBA general managers are perfectly fine.

Just a decade or two ago, you could find working NBA head coaches who were clearly overmatched and overwhelmed. Certain front offices just made universally panned move after universally panned move. You still have some teams that are stuck in mediocrity — Troy Weaver’s Pistons and Mitch Kupchak’s Hornets come to mind — and there is occasionally a head coach that has a one-season flame-out. But the scale is way off.

Gone are the days of David Kahn — a guy who traded down to draft an ineligible player and who called a veteran Darko Milicic the best big man passer since Vlade Divac — hiring Kurt Rambis to coach his team. (Name a more un-iconic GM-coach duo. You can’t. Oh wait.) Gone are the days when Vlade Divac fires Dave Joerger to hire Luke Walton shortly after his predecessor, the beleagur(ing/ed) Pete D’Alessandro fires Michael Malone to eventually hire an especially cantankerous George Karl. But you know what? Pete D’Alessandro didn’t pass on Luka Doncic to draft Marvin Bagley III. He only invited cameras in the room to document his owner pushing him to draft Nik Stauskas in the top 10.

Walton wasn’t the only Laker Legend to blow a huge opportunity as a head coach in the 2010s (Walton blew two, by the way) — Derek Fisher totally fumbled a high-profile NBA job, then blew a WNBA job too! Do you remember watching Mike Montgomery coach an NBA team? The short-lived Michael Curry era? Brian Shaw? The Tim Floyd eras, plural?