Was Pat Riley the Worst Coach?

Coaches — what are they good for? In terms of improving players the data shows that one coach is pretty much the same as the next. The most important thing a coach does is to decide who suits up and who sits on the bench. With that in mind, I found some players that had the distinction of playing for the worst coaches. When a coach has a terrific talent and decides that, instead of playing them, they would rather play someone else, they’ve failed in their duty. I looked for players that had great seasons but were limited in minutes thanks to iffy coaching. My full criteria was:

• Played 24.0 minutes per game or fewer
• Had a WP48 of over 0.200
• Played more than 41 games (half the season)
• Fulfilled the above criteria for more than one season

I came up with a fun list. Here are the players and their career stats for seasons they were underplayed:

Table 1: Underplayed Players stats for Underplayed Seasons

Some of these players — for example: John Stockton, Tracy McGrady, and Chuck Hayes – got out of their reduced roles and went on to get starter’s minutes. Others – like Dikembe Mutombo and Arvydas Sabonis – were older players who were not able to keep playing major minutes. With that said, many of the players on this list played at a very high level and were restricted in their playing time. Some fans may be willing to side with the coaches and claim that there were good reasons to keep these players on the bench. I’ll stay on the more cynical side and say it’s entirely possible that coaches don’t always know what they’re doing. And that just might mean that we should crown Pat Riley a bad coach given the way he handled Kurt Rambis’ playing time.

-Dre