Can the Portland Trail Blazers' next head coach find more balance after the team mutually agreed to part ways with Terry Stotts on Friday, as reported by ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski?
Led by the high-scoring backcourt duo of Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum, the Blazers have boasted a top-three offensive rating in each of the past three seasons, including No. 2 overall in 2020-21.
Yet after a league-average defense (16th on a per-possession basis) facilitated Portland's unexpected run to the 2019 Western Conference finals, the Blazers have had difficulty living up to the expectations that generated because of defenses ranked 27th on a per-possession basis in 2019-20 and 29th this season.
With Portland's ability to upgrade the roster limited by big extensions for Lillard and McCollum that kick in next season, the Blazers have to hope that Stotts' replacement can upgrade the defense without sacrificing what has made the team special on offense. What's the track record for teams attempting to pull that off? Let's take a look.
Imbalanced coaching change history
In theory, the idea is simple: Because an offensive-minded team already has the pieces in place to score efficiently, it can just hire a defensive-minded coach to improve at the other end of the court. In practice, it hasn't worked out quite that way.
Looking at playoff teams that made a coaching change since the NBA-ABA merger in 1977-78, this season's Blazers had the fourth-largest bias toward offense instead of defense, both relative to league average.
Among Portland's six predecessors to make coaching changes after an imbalanced playoff season, five of them had a worse net rating the next campaign. Remarkably, only half of them even improved on defense. When Nate McMillan left the Seattle SuperSonics after reaching the second round of the playoffs in 2005 to then coach the Blazers, Seattle's defense slipped from below average to one of the worst in NBA history under replacements Bob Weiss and Bob Hill.
The 2005-06 Sonics went from 52-30 to 35-47. That team and the 1983-84 San Antonio Spurs, who won 16 fewer games and missed the playoffs after reaching the 1983 conference finals, represent worst-case scenarios in Portland's situation. But three of the other four teams lost in the opening round the following season.
That brings us to the glaring exception on the list: the 1998-99 Los Angeles Lakers, who lost in the second round during the lockout-shortened season under interim coach Kurt Rambis, despite having the league's second-best offense led by All-Star Shaquille O'Neal and first-year starter Kobe Bryant.
In June 1999, the Lakers hired Phil Jackson, who was a year removed from winning the last of six championships with the Chicago Bulls.
In the first season using Jackson's triangle offense, the Lakers dropped to fifth in offensive rating. However, their defense improved all the way from 24th to No. 1 in the league on a per-possession basis, translating into an NBA-best 67 wins and -- after a famous fourth-quarter comeback against the Blazers in Game 7 of the conference finals -- the first of three consecutive titles.
Regardless of the similar performance of their offenses, this Portland team doesn't have the talent of those Lakers, who boasted two future MVPs in the starting five. Still, the alchemy the Lakers found improving on defense without sacrificing much offense is the lightning in a bottle the Blazers hope to catch. Unfortunately, the odds of that don't appear high historically.
Evaluating coaching fits
Wojnarowski listed four possible candidates to replace Stotts: LA Clippers assistant Chauncey Billups, former New York Knicks and Houston Rockets coach and current ESPN NBA analyst Jeff Van Gundy, Brooklyn Nets assistant Mike D'Antoni and Michigan's Juwan Howard.
D'Antoni is a surprising name. He has historically been associated with strong offenses rather than stout defenses.
In fact, the 2007-08 Phoenix Suns rank slightly lower on the list of most offense-biased playoff teams to change coaches (+6.2 bias) after D'Antoni left for the Knicks and was replaced by Terry Porter. (Consider that move another failure of the balance ideal: Porter lasted only a half season in Phoenix before being fired in favor of former D'Antoni assistant Alvin Gentry, whose tenure was basically an extension of D'Antoni's. Oddly, Porter also replaced George Karl with the most offensive-biased team on the list, the 2002-03 Milwaukee Bucks, before being replaced by Stotts there.)
We can point to D'Antoni's time with the Rockets as a case of a team using the opposite thinking. When Houston sought to replace interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff after the 2015-16 season (+3.3 bias), the expectation was they'd hire a defensive-minded coach to pair with a strong offense led by James Harden. Instead, the Rockets hired D'Antoni and leaned in to their strength, improving from seventh to second in offensive rating with the help of newcomers Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon and winning 14 more games.
Van Gundy is the more conventional candidate for Portland. Six of the eight teams Van Gundy has coached for a full season have ranked in the NBA's top five defensively, and none of them were worse than seventh on a per-possession basis.
Meanwhile, Billups and Howard are closer to blank slates at the NBA level. Billups just finished his first year as an assistant coach for the Clippers after working as a broadcaster for ESPN, while Howard's head-coaching experience has strictly come at his alma mater after six seasons as an assistant with the Miami Heat.
Howard's Wolverines teams have been highly balanced. Michigan ranked in the top 30 in both adjusted offensive and defensive rating after factoring in strength of schedule in 2019-20, per Kenpom.com, and last year's team that reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament was ninth in adjusted offense and No. 4 overall in adjusted defense.
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