Doc Rivers is out as Sixers coach. As long as Joel Embiid and James Harden are here, it won’t matter who’s in.
It's the rare NBA head coach who makes a genuine difference in his team's fortunes. Success comes down, usually, to superstars. And there are loads of questions about the Sixers' two.
The most damning fact about Doc Rivers’ tenure with the 76ers is that this was his best season with the 76ers. This season, which ended with a second-round collapse against the Celtics. With Joel Embiid and James Harden shriveling up under the pressure of a possible berth in the Eastern Conference finals. With Harden holding his tongue in the telltale manner of a star player who doesn’t give a damn if his head coach comes back. With Rivers losing a Game 7 for the fifth consecutive time and for the 10th time in his career. With the Sixers’ failing to advance past the second round of the playoffs for the 22nd straight year. This season.
Given that track record, given the circumstances of the Sixers’ roster makeup and intra-organizational dynamics, no one should be surprised that they fired Rivers on Tuesday. When a franchise reaches the stage that the Sixers have — the Perennially Underachieving Franchise with Players It Would Be Nearly Impossible to Trade Stage — replacing the head coach is always the easiest move to make. Just because it’s easy, though, doesn’t mean it will be effective.
The Sixers and everyone who follows them ought to enter this next era, whether it’s the Monty Williams Era or the Mike Budenholzer Era or the Coach Whose Name Hasn’t Come Up Publicly Yet Era, with their eyes wide open. With a realistic understanding of how much of a difference a new coach might make.
Blaming the Sixers’ embarrassing loss to the Celtics on Rivers feels a little like blaming climate change on a lonely middle-aged guy with a can of Right Guard poised near his armpit. In the NBA, there’s generally only so much influence that a coach has or can have on a team’s fortunes, and there are only so many exceptions to this rule.
Phil Jackson could Zen-master the very best out of the league’s very best, out of Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. Larry Brown could extract a 50-win season out of Allen Iverson, Chauncey Billups, and 10 one-eyed kangaroos. Erik Spoelstra seems not just Pat Riley’s mentee but his spiritual and strategic successor. But they’re the rare ones, and a quick perusal of recent and distant history reaffirms as much.
Of the seven head coaches to guide teams to the NBA Finals over the last four years (Steve Kerr and Golden State reached the Finals twice in that time), four of them are no longer with those teams. Nick Nurse, Frank Vogel, Tyronn Lue, Ime Udoka: Each of them is a head coach somewhere else or, at the moment, not a head coach at all. They’re smart, all of them. But it’s telling that Joe Mazzulla is just 34, that his only prior head-coaching experience, before he replaced Udoka, was at Fairmont State University, a Division II school in West Virginia, and that he has the Celtics back in the conference finals.
Lately, Gregg Popovich’s Boomer-on-Facebook-style political rants have done a nice job of distracting people from the fact that — without Tim Duncan, Kawhi Leonard, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili — he isn’t quite the coaching genius he used to be. The San Antonio Spurs haven’t had a winning season in five years. And if you’d like to argue that Avery Johnson, Mike Brown, Stan Van Gundy, David Blatt, Rick Carlisle, and Scott Brooks — all of whom, from 2006 through 2015, guided teams to the Finals and/or won once they got there — were primarily responsible for those moments of greatness, you’re welcome to make that argument. Though LeBron James, Dirk Nowitzki, and Kevin Durant, among other superstars, might raise a few objections.
Even Rivers himself was the beneficiary of having Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen — future Hall of Famers hungry for a taste of postseason success — in his locker room when he won his only championship in his 24 seasons as a head coach.
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That’s the point, really. For most NBA teams that are terrific for more than a minute, the tone-setters and culture-creators aren’t the head coaches but the centerpiece players. Duncan’s maturity and toughness empowered Popovich to coach him and the rest of the team with an edge. Steph Curry has been the engine of the Warriors’ dynasty, not only with his brilliant individual play but his relative unselfishness and humility. How many stars would have been open to sharing the spotlight with Durant? How many have offered to take less money for the sake of freeing salary cap space to keep other members of a championship-caliber team? James has the physical traits and on-court intelligence to morph into whatever kind of player his team happens to need at a particular time, and he doesn’t get enough credit for his willingness to do it.
The Sixers can hire Williams or Budenholzer or Nurse. They can search for the next Spoelstra, for the next unfamiliar name who reveals himself to be a brilliant choice. Hell, they can bring Brett Brown back; at least he coaxed some decent basketball out of Ben Simmons. No matter what coach they pick, they’re still likely to be leaving their future in the hands, first and foremost, of Embiid and Harden. Which means it’s possible that what happened Sunday in Boston is as good as it’s ever going to get.
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