NBA Coach of the Year Doesn't Reward Excellence
How the NBA's top coaching honor, isn't really the top coaching honor
The NBA loves to hand out awards. There isn’t a basketball show or podcast that won’t discuss, dissect, and debate who is the once and future MVP. The three All-NBA teams honor the league’s 15 (or so) best players. Throw in Defensive Player of the Year and the All-Defensive teams, and the NBA does a great job of telling you who the league’s royalty are.
However, that doesn’t stop them from distributing a dubious collection of end-of-season honors. From the All-Rookie teams to Sixth Man of the Year and Most Improved Player, the NBA has no issue bestowing titles on the non-landed gentry. In many respects, there are two sets of awards: the ones that matter, and the ones that don’t. And then there is Coach of the Year.
Since 1963, the NBA has presented a Coach of the Year award to the coach who best…well, nobody is really sure. While there is a bit of interpretation in what “Most Valuable” means, it almost always ends with one of the best players, on one of the best teams, walking away with the small trophy, as Hakeem Olajuwon would say. Coach of the Year, on the other hand, is both an award that matters and one that seemingly doesn’t.
When judging the greatest coaches of all time, two metrics stand above the rest– wins and championships. With that in mind, you would think that coaching the best team in the league would be a good predictor of Coach of the Year; you would be wrong. Out of 63 Coach of the Year awards, only six have gone to the eventual champion, 18 have gone to the coach with the best record in the league, and 27 have gone to a regular-season conference leader.
Now, they’re not just rewarding coaches from bottom-tier sides. On average, the Coach of the Year wins 55.2 games, but finishes 7.8 wins behind the league leader and 4.7 wins behind in the conference. These are upper-middle-class sides, but, on average, hardly juggernauts.
So, what exactly does the Coach of the Year reward? Generally, it rewards a coach for overseeing a surprising, significant improvement in wins. In the season prior to winning the award, teams won an average of 42.3 games, and then improved by 13.6 wins in the subsequent, award-winning, season. In fact, only twice has a coach overseen a decline in wins and brought home the award: Don Nelson in 1982-83 and Doc Rivers in 1999-00. If you want to win Coach of the Year, you need to take a mediocre team to slightly below the top of the league.
Does any of this really matter? Probably not. Coaches aren’t judged by how many Coach of the Year awards they have, and many of the greatest coaches ever have won it. However, that doesn’t mean the award is functioning the way it should. The general voting pattern is really rewarding the Most Improved or Surprising Team, but even then, they kind of screw that up.
Take the 2014-15 Coach of the Year as an example. In 2013-14, Mike Budenholzer’s first season in Atlanta, the Hawks won 38 games with a net rating of -0.5. They then exploded for 60 wins and a net rating of +5.8. However, 2014-15 also saw the rise of the Golden State Warriors, who won 67 games with a net rating of +10.2, leading the league comfortably in both categories. Despite that, Coach Bud walked away with Coach of the Year by a narrow margin over Steve Kerr.
What made the difference? Well, the 2013-14 season. Before dominating the league, the Warriors had won 51 games the year before with a net rating of +5.0. Going into the season, we believed the Hawks would be mediocre, and that the Warriors would be, at the very least, quite good. Instead, the Hawks were quite good, and the Warriors were a historically dominant team. In retrospect, the preseason expectations gave Budenholzer the edge in Coach of the Year voting over Steve Kerr, because it’s hard to say he did a better job.
The simple difference between the two teams’ seasons favored the Hawks. They won 22 more games and improved their net rating by +6.3 points, while the Warriors only won 16 more games and improved their net rating by +5.2. The problem is that adding wins isn’t a linear endeavor. Throughout all of NBA history, a grand total of 14 teams have won 67 or more regular-season games. Meanwhile, there have been 82 instances where a team has reached and/or eclipsed 60 wins. For as great a job as Budenholzer did, Kerr showed up in Golden State, turned a good team into an absolute monster, and completely changed modern basketball.
This issue, of not valuing the exponential difficulty in acquiring more wins, is quite apparent in the voting patterns. The average Coach of the Year recipient took a 42-win team to 55, which is impressive, but I’d argue it’s equally, if not more impressive, to take a 55-win team to 60. Then there is the issue with single-season variance causing win swings to look far more impressive than they ought to. Using the 2014-15 example again, the 2013-14 Hawks underperformed their point differential by two wins, while the 2014-15 edition overperformed theirs by four. That adds up to a six-win swing, nearly half of the average season-to-season improvement, not based on team play, but on small sample variance.
I don’t think most coaches care all that much about Coach of the Year, but it’d be nice if the award had a bit more rhyme or reason to it. There are very few recent instances where I feel like someone was completely robbed, but it does feel like a narrative, PR, and dumb luck award more than something that’s grounded in the tangible. Regardless, if you’re looking for the favorite in 2026, I’d wager J.B. Bickerstaff will walk away with the award. The Pistons are on pace to improve their win total by 18, weren’t preseason favorites to win their conference, and have the added benefit of underperforming their point differential last season and overperforming it this year. Maybe there is some rhyme to Coach of the Year voting, but there is certainly not a ton of reason.
For any inquiries about work, discussion, and the like, you can email me at nevin.l.brown@gmail.com.