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SALT LAKE CITY — Let’s play the NBA coaching game. Just answer the following question:
Which coach(es) deserved to be fired after this season?
A) George Karl: This season's Coach of the Year who led the Denver Nuggets to a franchise-best 57 wins despite not having a superstar and dealing with several player injuries.
B) Lionel Hollins: He coached the Memphis Grizzlies to a team-record 56 wins and their first-ever appearance in the Western Conference Finals.
C) Vinny Del Negro: Under his guidance, the Los Angeles Clippers surpassed 50 wins and won their first Pacific Division title ever. In his three years there, he also posted the highest coaching winning percentage in team history.
D) Tyrone Corbin: In his second full season on the job, Corbin’s Utah Jazz finished 43-39, missing the playoffs by two games. His career record after taking over for Jerry Sloan, who abruptly resigned three years ago, is 87-89.
If you are a common-sense thinking individual, your answer would clearly be D) Tyrone Corbin. And of course you would be wrong. Despite all their accomplishments, Karl, Hollins and Del Negro were let go after this year while Corbin is preparing for another season at the helm. Now Corbin is the ninth-longest tenured coach in the NBA despite just getting the job in 2011.
Doesn’t make sense, right?
#poll
In a league run by multimillionaire players along with management typically fueled by their own egos, agendas and misplaced thinking, the NBA doesn’t quite work as realistically as the real world. In fact, six coaches who led their teams to the playoffs this season lost their jobs. Meanwhile, Jason Kidd, who literally just retired as a player and has no coaching experience, was just hired to become the next head coach of the Brooklyn Nets.
I am all for teams wanting more, not standing pat and doing whatever it takes to win a championship, but this is getting ridiculous. The days of stable, legendary, what-says-goes coaches like Jerry Sloan are apparently over. But the league’s best coach is old school. The Gregg Poppovich-led San Antonio Spurs are in the NBA Finals again.
Maybe that’s what new Utah Jazz General Manager Dennis Lindsey, formerly the assistant GM of the Spurs, is hoping for in Corbin. A franchise that has been a model of consistency and stability staying with the same coach much like the Jazz did with Sloan all those years. But one can make the argument that if any team should make a change now it would be the Jazz.
As I’ve written here before, Corbin was put in an impossible situation this past year by management. Asked to lead a locker room of free-agent mercenaries while developing the youth, and oh by the way, expected to win and make the playoffs as well, most coaches would fail in that task. Because of that, letting Corbin coach this upcoming season seems to be the fair thing to do.
But as we’ve witnessed of late with coaches in the NBA, being “fair” isn’t quite the norm. Add in Corbin is on the last year of his deal, maybe now is the time to make a change.
“Yeah, we’ll no comment that question right now,” was Lindsey’s response on the radio show I co-host, Gunther and Graham on 1320 KFAN, on whether the Jazz will begin negotiations with Corbin or wait to see how the season plays out.
If the Jazz go the direction that Lindsey has been indicating, rebuilding by letting the younger players finally develop by actually playing (a novel concept, I know), then the season most likely will play out with a lot of losses, which should then position them for a high lottery pick in a stocked 2014 draft. Could you then honestly say Corbin will be retained even if the younger players show some development? Also considering new GMs usually like to bring in their own coach to lead their franchise and with Kevin O’Connor appearing to be transitioning out of the organization, giving more power to Lindsey, the likelihood of Corbin surviving appears slim.
So maybe it’s finally time for the Jazz to do something they typically don’t do — make a rash, abrupt change — now. At least they know they’re not the only ones. And clearly due to the lack of common-sense thinking of NBA teams, there are several worthy candidates with a much better track record than Corbin available.
