Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Yglesias notes the weirdness of Bill Simmons claiming that Rajon Rondo has experienced some vast improvement as a player, when in fact his stats have been mostly stable since last season and the only real change is the fact that he’s on a vastly better team and so has the opportunity to take better shots and contribute meaningfully to wins, rather than to the series of blow outs and debacles that typified the Celtics 2006-2007 season. So Rajon Rondo probably hasn’t, in some pure Platonic sense, turned into a better player. I doubt his trade value is that much higher, or that much higher than could have been expected last year. But what about Doc Rivers?

Doc Rivers, as anyone who read Bill Simmons last year could attest to, was the worst coach in Celtics history, the destroyer of a great franchise, a total embarrassment, a tanker etc. Has anything changed in the last year? Has he gotten any better at coaching? Of course not. Like Rajon Rondo, instead of being on a team where a discouraged and oft-injured Paul Pierce was the best player, he’s now coaching a team with the best core three players in the league. For all we know, he’s still the same, mediocre coach as always.

This, of course, brings up the question of what makes a good coach. There aren’t any statistics for coaches, because any of them would just be aggregate totals of their players performance. Of course, wins shouldn’t be the best metric for coaches. Wins can oftentimes be determined by general managers who assemble the teams. So what value added can a good coach provide? This is a very hard question to answer, and I don’t pretend to know. If anything, a coach can add, or detract, from a team’s performance on the margins.

Just look at the career of Phil Jackson. Sure, he’s won all those championships, but he’s also been able to coach the most talented teams of their respected eras. And when the Kobe-Shaq relationship finally deteriorated, he was unable to do much about it. But, on the other hand, there’s someone like Don Nelson. Nelson hasn’t been able to coach teams as good as Jackson’s, but most would say that he’s a good coach from a tactical and motivational stand-point. As far as tactics and strategy goes, he has consistently been able to innovate. He invented the point forward when he was with Milwaukee, introduced the hack-a-shaq with Dallas and brought the run-and-gun offense to suit his undersized Warriors. But how could we measure the contribution of someone like Nelson? I guess the best way to look at coach contributions would be to compare team records and stats with a certain coach to the year before without that coach, assuming that the roster remained the same. But it’s really rare for a team to significantly improve without new talent. Sure, Don Nelson was the coach of the 06-07 Warriors team that made the playoffs, but that’s also the team that jettisoned Troy Murphy and Mike Dunleavy and acquired Stephen Jackson and Al Harrington. There are just too many confounding variables to isolate Nelson’s contribution.

All of which brings us back to Doc Rivers. Maybe he wasn’t such a horrible coach after all, maybe it was just that he was coaching a terrible team. But even so, his coaching abilities haven’t greatly changed over the last year.