It is true that when Pat Riley sacked Stan Van Gundy early in the 2005-2006 season, the Miami Heat went on to win the NBA championship.
The brutally harsh and selfish move, drenched in ego as it was, did possess one fundamental advantage: The man who made the change was convinced that a better replacement could be found and hired.
When that man is the same person who runs the organization, well, it’s a bit easier to be a cutthroat operator… and to lead the way forward on the bench.
One does not get the sense that Daryl Morey is going to coach the Houston Rockets, now that he’s fired Kevin McHale three weeks into a new NBA season. We identified some replacements here, but it has to be said that the recent history of early-season coaching changes in the NBA is not pretty. Riley in Miami 10 years ago is the exception, not the rule.
The Brooklyn Nets, when firing Avery Johnson before New Year’s Day of 2013, did not make the deep playoff run they were hoping for. The Los Angeles Lakers fired Mike Brown early in their ruinous 2012-2013 season, and did not transform themselves — not in a good way, at least — under Mike D’Antoni. The Sacramento Kings pulled the trigger on firing Mike Malone early last season, and George Karl did not turn them around.
Yes, some organizations did move quickly to make coaching changes in recent years. To be precise, these teams acted more quickly than results or tenures (from the preceding coaches) would normally suggest. The Milwaukee Bucks snagged Jason Kidd from the Nets (or, one could say, Kidd made himself coach at the Bucks with the blessing of ownership — take your pick). That has worked out reasonably well. The Golden State Warriors’ decision to jettison Mark Jackson and bring in Steve Kerr proved to be a championship-winning masterstroke.
However, the obvious detail in those last two situations is that those changes were made between seasons, not within them. The early in-season firing is a different animal in the league, and unless you’re Pat Riley or a few select other individuals, that approach usually fails.
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Is this move unfair? The short answer is that all quick-trigger coach firings possess an inherent unfairness. It might be an unwritten rule, but it’s generally adhered to for good reason: Coaches who either succeed in a given season or are new to the job — in this case, the former applies — should get more time if the operation turns in the wrong direction. McHale guided this team to the West Finals last spring, in the face of considerable odds. That he wouldn’t get a chance to correct this early-season slump is patently unfair.
So, of course, was Riley stepping into the cockpit and throwing Van Gundy into the passenger cabin.
The validation and refutation of these kinds of moves are one and the same: the quality of the results which follow the decision. Riley won a title, which was the only way his decision in Miami could be seen as fully wise and enlightened in the course of time. Anything less would have opened the door, at least a little bit, to the idea that the move didn’t make sense for the organization. Anything less than an Eastern Conference championship would have branded the move an outright failure, with no qualifiers attached.
Houston and Daryl Morey might not deserve to be held to a “championship-or-bust” standard, given the pronounced flaws with this team through 11 games. However, if Houston cannot appreciably regroup before the season is through, everyone in the league will wonder why McHale didn’t at least get the chance to coach to the All-Star break (or something close to it). “Improvement, soon” is the message being sent by the Rockets here. Interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff needs to deliver that much in order for Morey’s decision to be validated.
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We can’t conclude a discussion of this topic without addressing the topic of responsibility for this mess. Yes, this move on Wednesday morning means that Dwight Howard will play for a ninth coach in 12 NBA seasons. It is therefore easy to dwell on Dwight as a source of difficulty and conflict — goodness knows, Dwight’s behavior at previous stops (including with the aforementioned Stan Van Gundy in Orlando) has merited such scrutiny and criticism.
However, that isn’t the problem here — not at all.
This is a James Harden problem. Others, such as Matt Moore of CBS Sports, have documented the problem in precise statistical fashion. Beyond the stats and the defensive decline, however, a more fundamental problem exists: Harden mouthed off in the offseason about how much he deserved to be MVP.
All professional sports are alpha-male (or alpha-female) realms. The ego needs to be harnessed in order to fit with team needs (or with larger goals for the individual athlete), but no successful athlete is ego-less. You have to believe you are the baddest man in the whole damned town; you don’t rise to the top of your profession without an Everest-sized level of self-confidence.
There are limits to this necessary development of ego, a central one being that if you bother to go public in an expression of self-belief or competitive confidence, you have to back it up. Your performance is always your best argument, so when you layer words on top of your game, you are taking a risk. If your play and your team’s results don’t match those words (even if the stats might happen to be very good), your reputation suffers, and rightly so.
Simply stated, James Harden’s reputation has suffered here. He — and the Kevin McHale-less Rockets — need to get it back under J.B. Bickerstaff and, potentially, under a permanent successor in the near future.
