Selecting an NBA Coach of the Year is a subjective endeavor.
This year’s competition features some familiar faces such as Mike Brown, Mike Budenholzer and Doc Rivers, who have all won the award before. This year’s contenders also include several candidates who are relatively new to the scene by comparison: Taylor Jenkins, Joe Mazzulla and Jacque Vaughn.
So how is this season’s Coach of the Year race shaping up?
To answer that question, we turned to three members of The Athletic‘s NBA staff who voted for the award last year: Sam Amick, James L. Edwards III and Josh Robbins.
What are your criteria for selecting the NBA’s Coach of the Year?
Sam Amick: Breaking down the Coach of the Year race is always an inexact science. You don’t have the sort of empirical data that plays such a big part in evaluating which players deserve all of the individual awards, nor do you have a crystal-clear understanding of how each coach has impacted his team on a daily basis. In the absence of that, I tend to focus on a few things.
1. Coaches whose teams were far better than we expected them to be.
2. Coaches whose teams appeared greater than the sum of their parts.
3. Coaches who appear to have synergy stylistically with star player(s) and role guys.
4. Here’s my personal cheat code: I favor coaches who impress their fellow coaches, scouts and executives around the league with whom we routinely speak and whose insight is invaluable. To put it simply, those people spend every waking moment analyzing this stuff and are the real experts.
James L. Edwards III: I’m very much a sucker for a good story. Has a team exceeded my expectations? Does a team put up a fight on most nights? Are the vibes good? Loosely, that is my criteria.
A lot of the NBA’s awards are determined on high-level team success, and while I understand that to an extent, I think it is often very shortsighted.
If a team we expected to be in the bottom three ends up playing .500 basketball past the halfway point of the season, that’s something, and it should be celebrated the same way we crown good teams for being, well, good.
Josh Robbins: Has the coach’s team significantly exceeded expectations? Is the coach’s team more than the sum of its parts? Do the players have clearly defined roles, and do they avoid going beyond those roles — what coaches would label “purpose of play”? Has the coach successfully guided the team through injuries to key players or off-court issues?
The answers to those questions tend to determine my vote, and the answers become clearer as the season progresses.
Nine of the last 10 Coach of the Year winners coached a team that finished third or better in its conference standings. The only exception occurred for the 2020-21 season, when the New York Knicks’ Tom Thibodeau won the award after his team placed fourth in the East. What would it take for a coach whose team is not in the top three of his conference to win the award?
Amick: This might be another outlier year on this front, and I’d be entirely comfortable with that being the case if it’s one of these two guys: Sacramento’s Mike Brown or Brooklyn’s Jacque Vaughn. The Kings are far better than anyone expected, and Brown’s fingerprints are all over their progress. If they finished, say, fourth in the West, that would be quite incredible considering this is a franchise that hasn’t been to the playoffs since … 2006! As for Vaughn, he has been a steady force ever since the Nets parted ways with Steve Nash in early November and gave him the reins. Even with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant missing significant time, and the Ben Simmons experience continuing to be a roller coaster, Brooklyn is hanging around with the East’s elite. If the Nets are a fourth seed, I could see Vaughn winning it.
Edwards: Similar to what I explained above, exceeding expectations. Obviously, expectations vary depending on who you talk to, but I think we as NBA media tend to have collective thinking when it comes to which teams we think will or won’t be good. Every year, though, there are always surprises. I like to reward those surprises.
Spoiler alert: My pick for Coach of the Year coaches a team that has capital “E” exceeded everyone’s expectations.
Robbins: I wouldn’t have any qualms voting for a coach whose team finishes outside of the top three in its conference as long as that team has exceeded reasonable expectations by a wide margin.
The NBA asks voters to pick first-, second- and third-place for Coach of the Year. Taking into account games through games played so far, how would you vote today?
Amick: First of all, I reserve the right to change my mind a dozen more times before the season comes to an end. But if I’m picking today, then I’d go with Brown (the Kangzerr, Kings are third in the West), Vaughn (for the reasons mentioned above) and Rivers (for now, it appears he has persuaded his stars to align in the kind of way that has the Sixers looking title-contender worthy). Boston’s Mazzulla is in the mix too, of course, as the Celtics have been out in front all season long despite the Ime Udoka controversy that could have derailed their operation. In terms of a Coach of the Year homework assignment, I need to learn more about how the Celtics folks and rival scouts see the part that he has played.
Edwards: I’ve been hinting at who my pick is, and it’s someone whose name I’m not sure 60 percent of basketball fans — and that number might be cutting it way short — knew to start the season: Mark Daigneault. People are learning to say his name now.
After that, I have the Kings’ Mike Brown at No. 2 and then New Orleans’ Willie Green at No. 3.
Robbins: A lot can change before the end of the regular season, but if the season had ended Monday, my ballot would have Brown first, Vaughn second and Mazzulla third.
Last season, the Kings finished 12th in the West at 30-52. Brown was hired during the offseason and led the Kings to third place in the West at 28-21. I know Domantas Sabonis was a trade-deadline acquisition last year, so I’m not quite comparing apples to apples, but Brown’s impact on the Kings has been superb. (Sacramento posted a 5-10 record last season in games Sabonis played.)
What separated your choice for the winner from your choice for runner-up?
Amick: Full disclosure, I live near Sacramento and have since even before my days as a Kings beat writer for The Sacramento Bee (2005-10). Point being, I was actually in the building the last time the Kings made the playoffs and have a front row seat now to the excitement this “Beam Team” has sparked in the community this season. But even beyond that impossible-to-ignore context, the fact remains that the Kings (so far) have exceeded expectations more, in my opinion, than the Nets. At least from a talent standpoint. Once you factor in the Durant trade request in the summer, his calling for the dismissal of GM Sean Marks and Nash and Irving’s well-chronicled choice to share antisemitic material on his social media, you begin to understand why Vaughn deserves a ton of credit for steadying their basketball ship.
Edwards: Once again, it goes back to expectations. The Thunder weren’t supposed to be this good this year — and the fact that I’m saying “this good” and they’re two games under .500 as of me typing this says all you need to know. This isn’t a super-talented roster. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who will be on my MVP ballot if this keeps up and OKC makes the Play-In Tournament, and Josh Giddey are the household names. After that, aside from Chet Holmgren, your average NBA fan probably can’t name two other players. And, well, can you blame them? What OKC has done this season has been impressive. SGA has been tremendous. Giddey, too. It’s hard to get players to continue to play hard for you, to buy in, after so many losing seasons. Somehow, somehow, Daigneault has kept everyone’s spirits high, and it’s paying off.
As for the reason I went with Daigneault ahead of Brown, it’s the talent level. Yes, Gilgeous-Alexander is the best player if you were to mash the Kings and Thunder together, but Sacramento probably has the next two or three spots locked up, and then, arguably, spots 5-9. Brown being the guy to get the Kings, possibly, over the hump is a great achievement, and maybe I’m contradicting myself, but he didn’t inherit a team that was lacking talent.
Maybe the coaching is the difference in Sacramento, and I just spent this entire time accidentally talking myself into Brown. But I’m stubborn, so I’m going to stick with Daigneault because I still can’t believe the Thunder are basically a .500 basketball team.
Robbins: The separation between Brown and Vaughn is razor-thin in my eyes. Brown gets the slight edge because the Nets have more overall talent and entered the season with higher expectations than the Kings had.
That said, the job Vaughn has done to steady the Nets through the midseason dismissal of Nash, the Irving debacle and Durant’s injury has been fantastic. Before Nash was fired, the Nets allowed 119.1 points per 100 possessions, ranking 29th in the NBA in defensive rating. Since Nash’s dismissal, Vaughn had the Nets allowing only 111.2 points per 100 possessions through Monday, good for sixth in the NBA.
(Photo of Joe Mazzulla: Barry Chin / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
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