NBA: Which College Coaches Could Be Successful In The Association?

Apr 7, 2015; Durham, NC, USA; Duke Blue Devils head coach Mike Krzyzewski (right) and guard Quinn Cook share a laugh during a welcome home ceremony at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Rob Kinnan-USA TODAY Sports

NBA teams have been seeking out coaching talent from the college ranks as of late. Which next wave of college coaches would have the most success in the pros?

NBA teams have been seeking out coaching talent from the college ranks as of late. Two years ago, the Celtics grabbed Brad Stevens from Butler and, in less than a full season later, he was widely being considered among the NBA’s top coaches.

The Bulls and Thunder have followed a similar strategy, hiring Fred Hoiberg from Iowa St. and Billy Donovan from Florida, respectively, to fill their head coaching vacancies. College basketball is overflowing with legendary coaching figures and while it seems that few, if any of them, would leave for the NBA, it can still make for a fun thought experiment. So let’s get started.

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The first thing we need to consider is that evaluating coaching on its own is an extremely difficult task. Coaching a basketball team comes with a variety of responsibilities, many (if not most) of which don’t directly involve basketball, and we get access to very few of them.

We get to see the final product, but aren’t given much insight into how it developed into its current state. We can assess the in-game strategy coaches use. We can see their schemes and how well their teams execute them, the way in which they use their personnel best to their advantage, and the more practical things such as clock management. Besides that, there’s not a whole lot we can gather. It’s impossible to see how responsible a particular coach is for the development of his players. Additionally, it’s impossible to surmise how responsible he is for providing the tactics we see on the court, without being able to parse out the influence of an assistant.

Basing a coaches value based purely on his success winning games is useful, but is by no means a all-encompassing indicator of his value. This is especially true at the college level, where’s coaches are dealt unquestionably varying hands.

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Second, we have to consider that the NBA and college basketball are very different games that require entirely different strategy. Seeing a basketball coach’s philosophy at the college level isn’t necessarily indicative of what his philosophy would be at the pro level. A coach could hypothetically advocate a slow, grind-it-out philosophy in NCAA ball and push a more run-and-gun style in the pros.

While a total and complete overhaul of philosophy from one level to the next seems unlikely, there’s just no way of knowing. Additionally, the responsibilities of a college coach are entirely different. The primary duty of an NBA coach is to be a tactician. Teaching seems like much less of a concern to a coach leading a team of adult professionals. Instead, an NBA head coach spends his time scheming to exploit his advantages while best hiding his weaknesses.

At the NCAA level, being able to drill fundamental basketball concepts through the thick skulls of college kids is much more prominent. The execution gap in the NCAA is vast compared to NBA. Many college coaches have found success just by getting their kids not to screw up the most fundamental schemes. If you’re able to properly execute a system, you’ve got a big leg up on the rest of the college landscape. On top of that a collegiate coach has far lesser tools to work with. There are few cases where a particular matchup would force a major change in gameplan.

So, we’ll have to search for tiny indicators of how sharp these coaches are. It stands to reason that if a coach is consistently able to find advantages to exploit at one level, he’ll be able to do so at another. Just keep in mind that this is little more a blind dart throw.

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