John Kuester, Cavs assistant for the past two seasons and unofficial offensive coordinator last year, is gonzo - off to become head coach of the Detroit Pistons.
What does this mean for the Cavs in ‘09-‘10?
To answer the question, you have to ask yourself just how important an assistant coach is to a team’s success? Here are the records of Kuester’s teams while he was an assistant.
Boston ‘95-‘97: 48-116 (Combined)
Philly ‘97 - ‘03: 255-205 (Combined)
Detroit ‘03-‘04: 54-28 (Championship)
New Jersey ‘04-‘05: 42-40
Philly ‘05-‘06: 38-44
Orlando ‘06-‘07: 40-42
Cavs ‘07-‘09: 111-53 (Combined)
What do these numbers tell us? I don’t think they really explain anything unless we look at the players on each of those teams. We’ll ignore who the head coaches were for now since I’m going to make the same point either way - shockingly, Kuester’s best winning percentage came when LeBron James was on his team.
In other words, who wins or loses a basketball game isn’t coming down to the coaches.
Although this is my opinion, I don’t believe it’s an opinion that a lot of people share. After all, people have been wanting to fire Mike Brown for the three years prior to this one because the offense “looked” stagnant. You could argue that Kuester’s move to offensive coordinator helped reinvigorate it for the ‘08-‘09 season - offensively, the Cavs were 20th in the league in ‘07-‘08 using points per possession as a benchmark; last year, they were 4th - but so did the addition of a point guard, a healthy Varejao, an improved LeBron, and a more acclimated Delonte West. At the same time, you have to give Coldstone credit for recognizing a weakness and giving more responsibility to Kuester for the betterment of the team.
In other words, measuring the value of a coach - be it head coach or assistant coach - is not at all a precise science because so many factors are variables are involved…and the big one is the players.
Phil Jackson now has more rings than any other coach in the history of the NBA, but to get to the tenth one it took getting Pau Gasol and Trevor Ariza on a team that already had Kobe Bryant and Lamar Odom. No matter what Phil did, until he had those players it wasn’t going to make a difference. The same thing could be said about Doc Rivers in ‘07-‘08.
This isn’t to say that coaches don’t matter. They do. I am extremely confident that if you put me in charge of the Cavs last season they wouldn’t have won anywhere close to 66 games. I have no experience running a team above the 6th grade level. I’m pretty good at dealing with people and managing personalities but am still learning - I certainly have no experience dealing with professional athletes, who are altogether a different breed of person. I would fail miserably.
But when it comes to the pool of acceptable candidates - those coaches both want the job and the team thinks they can do the job - I’m willing to say the differences are small.
Still, this doesn’t mean that some coaches aren’t better or worse than others. I had no reason to believe that Michael Curry was a good coach in Detroit, but how many games would Gregg Popovich have won with that team after the Iverson trade? Maybe a few more, but would it have made a substantial difference? How many championships would the Bulls during the Jordan era have won without Phil Jackson? I’m okay with you saying less…we could really only determine the truth through some kind of fantasy scenario…but with those players, not too many less.
A good example of where coaches can make a difference is in everyone’s favorite playoff series - Cavs-Magic. At the end of game 4, Orlando ran an out of bounds play, looked at the match-ups, called timeout, and then drew up a new play. Stan Van Gundy saw that Ben Wallace was on Rashard Lewis. He knew Ben would have a hard time chasing Lewis through a screen, so he took advantage of that situation and set Lewis up for the 3 pointer on the wing.
Was this a smart pickup on Van Gundy’s part? Absolutely. Did the players still have to execute the screens properly? Yes. Did still Turkoglu have to make the right pass? Of course. And, finally, did Lewis still have to make the shot? Most definitely.
So, really, it came down to the players.
Listening to a lot of analysts and reading too much internet chatter leads me to believe that there’s a perception that the Cavs aren’t aware of a bunch of plays that the other teams in the NBA know about and utilize consistently. This is a ludicrous idea - everyone looks at the same tape, they all go to coaching clinics, read the same books, study the history of the game.
The biggest problem for the Cavs, despite ranking 4th in the NBA in offense, in most people’s minds is their stagnant offense in the fourth quarter - which is almost always attributed to Mike Brown and the Cavs “ineffective role players.” Why no one puts the onus on LeBron for dribbling too much and making the ball stop is another issue entirely (it’s hero worship, I think), but to say that the coaches aren’t in large part at the behest of the players the GM and the league has given them, is an argument I can’t get behind.
So how will the Cavs fare without John Kuester? I suspect they’ll miss him…but they’ll be fine.
Now, as far as this Anthony Parker signing goes….
