The 2015-16 NBA season has been filled with candidates with legitimate reasons to become the winner of the annual Coach of the Year award. There have been coaches leading dominant teams, coaches surviving injuries and lack of stars, and coaches exceeding expectations to lead downright surprising success stories.
There are about seven or eight coaches who are deserving of a place in the ballot. But unfortunately only one can win the award. There are cases to be made for others, and some logical choices will even be left off of the ballot. In general, there are two main criteria to picking a coach of the year winner: leading a fantastic team or exceeding expectations and doing the most with the least.
With that being said, here are my top three rankings for the prestigious award. Honorable mentions to Dwane Casey (the Raptors are the second seed in the East and look like contenders), David Joerger (keeping the Grizzlies in the playoffs despite trotting out more players than any other team due to injuries), Brad Stevens (the Celtics spent most of the season as the third seed in the East with no real stars and only two great players in Isaiah Thomas and Jae Crowder) who all fall just short of the final top three ballot.
3. Gregg Popovich:
Before starting this piece, I asked my Twitter followers for their picks for the coach of the year and out of 10-15 responses, only one person named San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich as a potential candidate. That is the epitome of Spurs’ basketball with the team quietly putting together a season nearly as great as that of the Warriors.
San Antonio is on pace for just about 69 wins this season, tying them with the second greatest regular season record of all time (not including the Warriors who will almost certainly surpass that.) That alone is enough to put Pop on the list.
But there are other circumstances that lead one to believe Popovich is a real and legitimate choice to win the award. Pop has put together a dominant defensive team, leading the league in defensive rating by allowing just 96 points per 100 possessions. The gap between them and the 2nd place Atlanta Hawks (at 98.8) is larger than the gap between the Hawks and the 7th place Clippers (101.5).
But San Antonio has not simply done it on the defensive end. They have also been an offensive juggernaut, scoring 108.9 points per 100 possessions, good for third place in the league. In fact, the Spurs are one of only two teams in the NBA (the Warriors being the other) that is in the top five of both offensive and defensive rating. As a result of that multi-faceted dominance, the Spurs actually lead the league in net rating at 13, outscoring opponents by one more point per 100 possessions than the Warriors. Similarly, their point differential of 11.7 is larger than that of the Warriors (11.1).
Pop will not win the award for multiple reasons (the lame “Spurs are boring” argument and the Warriors winning ability being the chief among them), but he is as deserving as any other candidate.
2. Terry Stotts:
Stotts is a different type of candidate. His Portland Trail Blazers are not a dominant team; instead holding on tight to the sixth seed in the Western Conference and probably looking at a first-round exit in the postseason. However, the fact that the Blazers are this good is an incredible feat in and of itself.
After losing 80% of the team’s starting lineup over the offseason, most preseason predictions had Portland sitting far away from the playoffs. A certain someone whose opinion you are now reading thought they would have a difficult time reaching 25 wins. Instead, here they are on pace for 42 wins and a playoff berth.
Stotts has implemented an incredibly great offense leading to the Blazers sitting with the seventh best offensive rating in the league. He is doing this with players who were previously thought of as replacement level guys in the NBA. Al-Farouq Aminu has turned into a good three point shooter, CJ McCollum has turned into one of the better shooting guards in the league, Ed Davis has been unleashed to do the dirty work, Mo Harkless and Mason Plumlee are legitimate role players in this system.
The things that Stotts has done with a roster that was thought to be one of the worst in the league is downright amazing. The players deserve plenty of credit and Damian Lillard is an All-NBA guard candidate, but their head coach has put them in the position to succeed. For that, he deserves credit and a place in the Coach of the Year ballot.
1. Steve Kerr
This might be a slightly controversial pick. There are reasons against picking Kerr to be the coach of the year. The biggest argument against giving Kerr the award is that he missed a large portion of the season. After undergoing back surgery in the offseason, Kerr did not return until January 22nd. In the time that he has been on the sidelines, the Warriors have gone 27-3. Of course, he has also received credit for the record the Warriors have accumulated over the entire season.
There are also multiple reasons why Kerr deserves the award, however. First, the Warriors are on pace for 74 wins, outpacing the record-breaking ’96 Bulls by two games. Even if Kerr was not on the sidelines for the entirety of the season, his coaching and system have been a catalyst for this massive success.
As mentioned above, the Warriors have been exceptional on both ends of the floor. On the offensive end, especially, Golden State has been otherworldly, scoring 113 points per 100 possessions, 3.1 more than the second place Oklahoma City Thunder. Basketball-Reference, which puts the Dubs’ offensive rating at 115 due to a different measurement method, has the team as being the seventh best offensive team of all time and the best since the 2009-10 Suns. This is not to mention an often dominant defense (which led the league in defensive rating last season).
Another reason to give the record to Kerr is that he has been doing this for two seasons now. Kerr probably deserved the award last season but he lost it to the more surprising (and also impressive) Hawks and head coach Mike Budenholzer. But the Dubs head coach has gone an incredible 133-22 (.858) thus far in his two seasons as a coach, by far the greatest winning percentage of any coach ever. That winning percentage will not stand the test of time, of course, but there is something to be said for such a dominant performance in a head coach’s first two years on the job.
While there are multiple deserving candidates for the Coach of the Year award, Steve Kerr is the only one leading a squad that will likely finish as the greatest regular season team of all time. For the dominance with which he has led this Warriors team over the past two seasons, he should be rewarded with the prestigious award.
