Where should Phil Jackson be ranked among all-time NBA coaches?

The Game Room
1

With his tenth ring last night, Big Chief Triangle has now passed Red Auerbach for the most NBA Championships won by a head coach. Even so, his all-time status is often down played or qualified because he won six of those titles with the best player of all time, three with a rockstar tandem of one the most dominating centers who ever played and arguably the second best shooting guard. He won his tenth with that same shooting guard, but it’s his first title won without at least two Hall of Famers in his starting lineup. Because he’s always been gifted with supremely talented players, his importance in coaching them to championships has always been questioned, sometimes even disparaged.

I would point out that Auerbach wasn’t exactly coaching garbage. He had some guys like Russell, Cousey and Havlicek that were pretty good. In fact, I don’t know of any NBA coaches who ever won titles – certainly not multiple titles – without great talent. I would also point out that Jackson was not the first or the last coach Michael Jordan played for in the NBA, nor was he the first to coach the tandem of Shaq and Kobe, but he was the only won who got those respective teams to the promised land, and not just once, but again and again.

I also think something has to be said about the modern state of the NBA and the extra skill set that it takes to coach in a league where the players have the slaries, the clout and the egos that they have today.

Another thing that should be pointed out is that Jackson has to win more series just to get to the Finals than Auerbach did.

For the above reasons, I think Jackson deserves a lot more credit than he currently gets. Ten freaking rings is ten freaking rings, and and those players like Jordan and Kobe are the first ones to say how important they think Jackson was/is to their success.

I still don’t think I’m ready to say that Jackson should be rated number #1 all-time among coaches, but I don’t have a problem putting him at #2 behind Auerbach.

What say the rest of you is he top 3? Top 10? Or just lucky enough to fall ass-backwards into superstar talent?

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Phil Jackson should be #2. He’ll always be behind Red in my book, but then again no one reads my book.

In all seriousness though - two completely different era’s, and thus hard to compare. It’s why the baseball HoF puts in the clarification that the player has to be one of the best ones in their era. I think that applies to Phil and Red as well.

But like I said - if you’re just looking for numbers, I’d say Red is still #1.

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I’d put him first. We aren’t sure what a lesser coach would do with Auerbach’s teams, but we have a pretty good idea with Phil Jackson that he was a huge part of making his teams champions where other coaches couldn’t.

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Hijack: They do no such thing. “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.”*

*http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/hofers/rules.jsp

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This would describe Mike Brown level results, not Phil Jackson level results. Jackson’s among the best.

I think Auerbach once weighed in on this and gave himself the upper hand because he picked his own players. And he deserves a lot of credit for that. You can argue about whether or not that counts as coaching or if it’s talent evaluation. On the other hand, there are more teams now and the playoffs are far longer, not to mention the amount of ego massaging that is now involved in coaching guys who are getting paid the way these guys are getting paid.

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Both Auerbach and Jackson are (or were in Red’s case) masters at motivation and manipulation. I’d give Red the edge because I think he could’ve come back and coached more if he wanted to, as retired at age 48. I think Red was really the coach of the '74 & '76 Celtics, not Tommy Heinsohn, IMHO.

Choosing either one of them is like choosing between Halle Berry and Angelina Jolie though. You can have first pick and I’ll be more than happy with whichever one’s left. :slight_smile:

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That’s the thing. I think coaching nowadays is more about managing egos than “coaching” fundamentals. It’s kinda unfair to to compare the two because they were essentially doing different jobs. That being said, I don’t even think it’s Jackson is a far better coach than his contemporaries like Pat Riley (5 rings) and Greg Popovich (4 rings). What separate the three seems to be mostly player talent and luck. I strongly believe that Papovich and Riley could have won 10 rings had they been in Jackson’s place.

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I don’t know, which is a more talented team, do you think: Magic, Kareem, Worthy, Michael Cooper, Bob McAdoo, Byron Scott, and Kurt Rambis, or Kobe, Gasol, Lamar Odom, Derek Fisher, Trevor Ariza, and Andrew Bynum?

Or Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Michael Finley, Manu Ginobili, Brent Barry, Bruce Bowen, and Robert Horry vs. Jordan, Pippen, Horace Grant, BJ Armstrong, John Paxson, Stacey King, and Bill Cartwright?

At least, it doesn’t seem to me that the guy who coached the latter team in each instance was clearly the lucky beneficiary of a super-roster to the extent that you can’t even compare the success of one to the other.

I mean, it’s clear that Jackson has coached some great players, certainly, but I think it’s unrealistic to say that luck and talent are the deciding factors when you’re comparing, on the one hand, a guy who’s taken two iterations of the same roster to multiple championships in Popovich, and a guy who inherited a world champion-caliber roster and won 4 titles before he even knew what hit him, and then won one more years later (in a pretty lackluster and controversial playoff year, but that’s really beside the point) in Riley, to a guy whose track record is basically that he shows up in a place where they haven’t won before, and then they win an NBA title, and then they win another one.

The difference between 10 championships and 3 championships can barely even be measured. Phil Jackson would be the only person in the history of any sport to have that kind of luck. Maybe it was a fair thing to say about him when he won, essentially, every NBA championship that was contested while he was coaching the Bulls (which is pretty much what he did), because hey, Jordan is Jordan, but at this point I think we have to acknowledge that no, other coaches have had similar levels of talent, but nobody’s ever won as consistently as Jackson.

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Fair point, but you are comparing Riley’s best team, which existed when the talent pool was far deeper, and Jackson’s worst team, which won in a lackluster fashion in a year where several superstars were hurt. In the case of the Spurs, I think Jordan’s Bulls were more talented if only because Jordan himself was so talented.

This is just disingenuous. The Lakers and the Bulls were both on the cusp of being great before Jackson arrived. Two years prior to Jackson arriving in LA (97-98), they went to the Western conference finals, and finished 61-21; a better record than Jackson had in all but 2 seasons as coach (this past year and 99-00).

The year before Jackson arrived in Chicago, they went to the Eastern Finals, where they were beaten by Detroit (as the were the next season under Jackson). Two years before Jackson arrived, they lost to Detroit in the Eastern semi-final. Like most coaches, Jackson inherited great teams. To state otherwise is fantastically naive. Do you really think Jordan wouldn’t have won multiple championships without Phil? What about Shaq & Kobe?

He has always coached good teams. That doesn’t mean he is a bad coach, nor does it diminish his accomplishments, but it doesn’t establish him as the best coach ever, or event he best coach of his generation by default.

But no other coach has coached so many superstars in the modern era either. Jordan, Kobe, and Shaq will probably go down as 3 of the top 10 of 15 players to ever play the game. Rodman and Pippen will likely join them on a longer list of the greatest to ever play. How many coaches have had that kind of talent? Even the ones that did have great players (Jerry Sloan, etc.) were unlucky enough to play in an era where Jackson had better talent.

Jackson has never made a bad team good. In fact, he left the Lakers when the going got a little too rough. While there is no doubt Jackson is a great coach, his level of success has been largely due to things beyond his control.

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I think you meant to say that Jackson left the Bulls, not the Lakers.

I would like to see how Jackson would do coaching the Clippers, but I don’t think God himself could successfully coach the Clippers.

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This last title is the only one you can say he won without having the undeniably best team in the league, and thats because Van Gundy did the hard work for him (both before and during the finals). I’ve never heard the words “Phil Jackson turned that franchise around”, hes only coached teams on the cusp of winning the championship.

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Arguably, the Jordan interregnum Bulls (particularly the 93-94 I think it was model) overachieved significantly compared to expectations.

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That first run of rings he had with the Bulls wasn’t laden with talent aside from MJ and Pippen. It had a lot of role players who overachieved, and getting players to accept and succeed in specific roles is one of Jackson’s hallmarks as a coach. He even got Rodman to be relatively well behaved and team-oriented for three years.

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I wouldn’t say the Bulls’ role players overachieved; I’d say Jackson put them in roles they could succeed in. You, Hodges, Paxson and Kerr, are going to be spot-up jump shooters who will put in open jump shots when Jordan is triple teamed. You, Cartwright, Longley, Wenningham & Purdue, are going to beat the living crap out of the other team’s center, especially if his name is Brad Daugherty. You, Grant, King and Rodman, are going to rebound, etc.

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No, I don’t buy that at all. That’s Jordan talking, saying, “Nobody expects us to win”, when the truth of the matter is that after they dethroned the Pistons the Bulls were the pundits’ choice. Jordan is and was full of shi-ite.

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Sorry, by “Jordan interregnum” I mean the team after Jordan retired the first time. The one with Scotty Pippen as the sole star and Horace Grant as the second-best player.

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There’s also the fact that we’re looking at Jackson’s teams in hindsight and saying “See? They were on the cusp,” but the truth of the matter is (again, and this isn’t me being disingenuous, just deliberate) when Jackson showed up in Chicago and in LA, they hadn’t won a damn thing. Shaq and Kobe’s Lakers were swept or nearly swept out of the playoffs every year before Jackson got there, at which point they won 67 games and a title, immediately.

It just isn’t a fair assessment to say Jackson was the beneficiary of special talent and luck. Other coaches had the opportunity to do what he’s done 10 times now, and none of them did it.

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At least one of Jackson’s 10 championships should have an asterisk, IMHO; 2002 was a gift.

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That’s the '94-'95 season.

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Isn’t 94-95 when Jordan came back midseason?
And 93-94 was when he was gone the whole time?