Coach McMillan Wonders If Guards Make Better Coaches

Sorry I didn’t contribute better during my brief coaching career, fellow forwards. – Elgin

That might screw any statistic a bit ;)

Can anyone picture Travis Outlaw as a coach! Ha, I literally LOL’d.

Is whether the differences are ‘statistically significant’ in a scientific or meaningful way. I’d check your work, Ben, but I’m on my phone. Anybody else want to run some independent t-tests?

Mystery Science Theater gone NBA.

How many centers and forwards has been hired as coaches?

If one center was hired to ten guards than that is not a fair analysis.

Maybe that is why centers don’t post up anymore; guards would rather shoot the ball or pass it out to a 3 pt shooter. There is no reason for centers to post up if they are not going to get the entrée pass anyway.

hg

who cares really who the coach is or what position he played (I have a lot of respect for Nate, by the way) as long as his team wins? Just a thought

I’d assume that a former nba player that is not a head coach is worse coach than a former nba player that has won at least 100 games… since coaching is a higher paying job than most ex players have.

He was so bad, he brought down your entire model. How well would Guards have done without his statistical influence?

i bet he has a big part in one of those categories.

I dont take away from your data that guards are ‘better’ coaches, only that there are more of them. The % of player/non-player and each position is relatively equal. The quantity of the guards is more, but the quality is pretty much the same.

Because statistically there are more 6’4" and shorter humans on the planet than 6’5" and taller humans. Since the pool of possible coaches is smaller, we can expect the overall number of F and C sized coaches to be proportionately smaller. This assumes a correlation between sucessful coaching and population, but you’d also have to consider the number of teams in a given league too.

This assumes there are fewer super tall people than moderatly tall people, which I feel isn’t too far of a stretch.

This also explains why 7’3" stiffs like Thabeet get nba jobs. There aren’t many of them on the planet.

Can you dig it?

Among ex-players, guards are coaching many more games than their numbers in the players ranks would suggest. It’s clearly much more likely you will be hired if you’re a guard, even if we assume they account for 2/5 (or even 1/2) of the player pool.

But among ex-players’ winning percentages, ex-guards aren’t winning more. I’m not convinced that means anything: i would guess that crappy teams are even more likely to hire ex-guards, but who knows. Teams measure success lots of ways, including who is willing to work for less $.

In terms of hiring coaches: there is no doubt that guard bias exists, assuming an ex-player is hired.

selected as NBA coaches means to me that NBA executives have valued the guards disproportionately. That seems to tip the argument, assuming that guards are 40% of the player population.

I firmly believe that guards make better basketball coaches in the same way that catchers make better baseball managers. When you run the show on the field of play, you have relevant experience and/or personality to be able to run the show off the field.

But as this exercise shows, it is difficult to prove statistically within the highly selective and tiny pool of NBA coaching positions.

What can be shown is what chnews said – they are hired more often.

Another show where we have to watch people sit and talk for an hour. I haven’t seen anything like that on Comcast Sportsnet in about 10 minutes…

Guards are at 52% win/loss simply because of their far greater and significant sample size of coaches and games played. If there were a greater sample size of forwards and centers as NBA coaches I believe you too would find their win/loss percentage gravitating more towards the 52% mark.

It would be reasonable to infer that more former guards are chosen as coaches due to their experience on-court playing the role of floor general. The guard position more than any other position traditionally (i.e. point forwards are a modern day anomaly) is designed to steer and direct the entire team throughout the game.

But to suggest that IQ is inversely proportionate to height is just lame… some of the dumbest dudes I know are on the short side. Purely anecdotal, not statistical, but I seriously don’t buy that tall guys are unintelligent.

I have two questions.

Are point guard coaches similar to catcher coaches in MLB?

Is Bill Laimbeer the most successful former center coach? He won three championships with the Detroit Shock.

So if you have a couple of really extreme good and bad apples, do you take those out?

Phil Jackson has one a lot and is likely a dot all by himself. where do all the other dots sit?

Isiah, is he a dot by himself or does he have a lot of company? what does the data look like when you remove those extremes? Is there a middle ground or is there a cluster on each side of the spectrum?

Does perception influence the data? The conventional wisdom that guards make better coaches, does that mean that people only higher guards and thus the higher percentage of guards as coaches?

What percentage of coaches from each of the sections would be “upper tiered”? Jackson would be. Poppavich would be. What percentage would be average? what percentage would be below average?

Travis Outlaw and Mike Rice in “Fishing With Super-Trout”.

Could you imagine Travis Outlaw and Mike Rice hosting a fishing show together? Where would the conversation take us!?! I could listen to Travis and Mike talk about anything – Outlaw’s game winning shots, life in Starksville, Mississippi, jumping from prep-to-pro, nuclear physics, etc and it would be awesome.

I don’t know if that would make any difference, but it could skew things. It might help to only look at the last 20 years.

Of course, Red Aurbach (5’9, asthma) was never going to be a pro player, even if it was an option at the time.