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הי לכולם.

Do coaching changes work?

Not necessarily, according to comparative season win averages

Updated: May 16, 2014, 12:19 PM ET

By Kevin Pelton | ESPN Insider

 

James Devaney/GC ImagesWill the Golden State Warriors' hire of Steve Kerr pay off next season?

 

At the press conference introducing the Detroit Pistons' new head coach, the man behind the decision told reporters about the thorough process that led to the choice. "It took some time, but we feel like we got the right guy for what we're trying to do," he said.

That guy wasn't Stan Van Gundy, mind you. This press conference was last June, when then-Pistons president Joe Dumars was announcing Maurice Cheeks as head coach. But it could have been any of the four press conferences Dumars gave for new coaches in the six years beforehand. Each time — like every team making a coaching change — Detroit was confident it found the right coach. Each time, the results quickly proved otherwise. And recent history shows the Pistons are more the rule than the exception when it comes to changing changes.

 

 

Change for the worse

 

 

Over the last decade, NBA teams have changed coaches between seasons 70 times — an average of between once every four and five years. Of those, a handful were coaches resigning, leaving as free agents, retiring or parting with some kind of mutual arrangement between team and coach. That leaves 61 coaches who were fired or replaced when their contracts expired. In these cases, teams made a choice to move on because they believed they could improve. That didn't happen.

On average, teams that replaced their coach within the past decade won 42.5 percent of their games the previous season. (Naturally, bad teams are more likely to make a change than good ones, since they more likely failed to meet preseason expectations.) The following season? They collectively won 42.2 percent of their games.

That might not be so bad except for the pull of parity in the NBA. Whether they change coaches or not, teams are likely to drift toward .500 because of the aging process, the draft and their luck evening out. Based on the average progression of all teams, we would have expected teams that made coaching changes to improve to a collective 45.5 winning percentage the following season. Instead, they underachieved by 2.7 wins on average. And just 40 percent of teams performed better than expected.

 

 

Sorting by tiers

 

 

Not all coaching changes are created equally, certainly, so it's worth splitting the data out by the winning percentage of the team the year beforehand. Here's how that looks.

 

TEAMS THAT REPLACE THEIR COACHES

Year1 W # Win% Y1 xWin% Y2 Win% Y2 %Better
55+ 5 .705 .623 .490 .20
45-54 5 .612 .567 .520 .40
35-44 18 .480 .488 .441 .28
25-34 21 .368 .421 .409 .48
24- 11 .234 .340 .340 .55

 

The better the team, the worse the results of a coaching change. Since just five teams with better than 55 wins the previous season have replaced their coach by choice, the enormous fall taken by the 2009-10 Cleveland Cavaliers, which was probably more attributable to the loss of LeBron James than Mike Brown, carries outsized importance. But two of the other four teams in this category (the 2008-09 Pistons and this year's Denver Nuggets) also slipped below .500.

Overall, there are just 10 examples of teams with at least 45 wins choosing to replace their coach in the last decade. However, these coaching changes appear to be occurring with increasing frequency. In a 2009 study, I found that five teams had replaced their coach after winning 50 or more games between 1983 and 2006. Since then, it's happened nine times in eight seasons, including three teams last year alone.

The Golden State Warriors, who replaced Mark Jackson with Steve Kerr, are the latest team to join this group. There are examples of a coaching change paying off as hoped for a team already in contention. The aforementioned Pistons won a championship in Larry Brown's first year at the helm replacing Rick Carlisle, and the L.A. Clippers surely don't regret replacing Vinny Del Negro with Doc Rivers this year. But the misses outweigh the hits, a prospect that should temper expectations for Kerr and the Warriors.

Even at lesser levels of success, winning teams have found it difficult to improve by changing coaches. Of the 18 teams coming off a .500 season or better who replaced their coach, just five performed better than expected after accounting for their tendency to regress to the mean.

The rest of this year's current coaching vacancies, including Detroit, are with teams that finished in the lottery. Those teams have a better chance of finding an upgrade on the sidelines. Still, more than half of below-.500 teams (23 of 42) who replaced their coaches did worse than expected had they made no change. If it's not as clear that changing coaches is a bad idea for bad teams, nor is it clear that a coaching change helps them.

There's no obvious explanation for this phenomenon. Perhaps it can be explained by the time needed for a new coach to implement his system, but the effect persists at a lower level even in year two. Teams that replaced their coaches win 44.2 percent of their games two years down the road, when we'd expect them to win 46.9 percent based on the pull of parity. Maybe the problem, as in Detroit, is the decision-making of the executive choosing the coaches.

Whatever the explanation, history suggests skepticism is in order during Kerr's press conference and the other ones held to introduce new coaches elsewhere in the NBA. They will find it difficult to improve on their predecessors, and the next press conference might be to announce their replacement.

 

 

 

מנחם לס

מנהל הופס. הזקן והוותיק מכולם בצוות. מנסה לכתוב יומית - כל זמן שאוכל!

לפוסט הזה יש 34 תגובות

  4. captain beefheart

    13 מאי 2014 16:50:38

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  5. Berch

    13 מאי 2014 17:02:08

    משחק שיכול להגמר בשוויון… אז למה באנו ?
    אפס
    אפס אפס

    אני לא חובב של הז'אנר אבל בהצלחה עם היוזמה…. רק שזה לא ישתלט לנו פה על האתר. המונדיאל זה באוף סיזן ?

  6. מנחם לס

    13 מאי 2014 17:04:01

    המונדיאל מתחיל כשהפלייאוף מסתיים, אבל בכל מקרה, ה-NBA (הדראפט וכל מה שקורה אחריו) הם תמיד בהתייחסות ראשונה!

  10. צביקה

    13 מאי 2014 18:12:03

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    1. מתן גילור

      13 מאי 2014 20:43:07

      במחילה ממך, אבל מי שהציע את רעיון יומני המונדיאל זה אני והצעתי זאת עבור גרמניה.
      חוץ מזה שהפריוויו למשחק מול פורטוגל כבר מוכן אצלי על המחשב 🙂
      ובכל זאת לא נעים לי למנוע ממך זאת, אז אם אתה רוצה לעשות משהו בשותף זה אפשרי.

  20. יאיר

    13 מאי 2014 22:29:23

    חברים יקרים: סיקורי המונדיאל יתחילו ממש בקרוב (שבוע הבא לפי מקורות יודע דבר אנחנו כבר נסתער). גרמניה נתפסה כבר מזמן ע״י מתן, דור בלוך עשה שוט גאן על בלגיה. עבדכם בחר באנגליה (פשוט זה הולך להיות יומן קצר…) ויש בתגובות כאן שלושה מתנדבים לצרפת, ספרד והולנד (אם הקטע אם איראן זה ברצינות אז בשמחה). את הכתבות עצמן אתם מוזמנים לשלוח אליי yairzaafrani@gmail.com

  21. מוש

    14 מאי 2014 00:15:03

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    כלומר, אני יכול. אך על פי רוב גם כשאני מתחייב הזמן בוגד בי.
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