No NBA coaches should have total control of their roster

If the best coach in the NBA didn’t think he could function well as both head coach and executive, nobody should be doing it.

NBA news was made on Monday, as the Detroit Pistons and Stan Van Gundy went their separate ways, exactly one week less than four years from the time when Van Gundy came to Detroit both as head coach and president of basketball operations.

Van Gundy’s tenure with the Pistons was less than stellar. Detroit made the playoffs just once in his reign, and didn’t remain there long after being swept by the Cleveland Cavaliers. Van Gundy’s Pistons went 152-176 in his four seasons at the helm.

Unfortunately for the Pistons, the bad news does not stop at what has already happened in Detroit. The future there isn’t bright, as Blake Griffin, Andre Drummond and Reggie Jackson are all owed a lot of money over the next two years (with Blake getting even more in 2020-21).

Talent, fit and injury concerns mean they could be earning it on a Pistons team that still doesn’t get back to the postseason, that also doesn’t have the ability to add other pieces due to their salary commitments. The Blake trade has been the big move that’s been picked apart since the news of Van Gundy leaving Detroit broke, but its far from the only questionable personnel move he made.

Langston Galloway failed to shoot 40 percent from the field this season, and he’s got a combined $14 million coming to him over the next two seasons. Jon Leuer is a career 6.7 point per game scorer who missed almost all of 2017-18 with an ankle injury who has more than $19 million coming to him over the next two seasons. Luke Kennard isn’t bad, but Donovan Mitchell, who went one pick later in the 2017 NBA Draft, is a heck of a lot better. (Sorry Kennard hive!)

Although these mistakes happened under Van Gundy’s front office tnure, its the Pistons who will really pay for them. There is a lesson to be learned from this for NBA teams everywhere: do not ever give your coach personnel control.

Being a head coach in the NBA is very difficult. Only 30 of those jobs exist, and a noticeable number of them become vacant every single season because of the demands that come with the position. Being an NBA executive isn’t a walk in the park either. For every Danny Ainge, there are a whole lot of Rob Hennigans.

Trying to do both jobs at once is, logically, harder than doing one or the other, which means its pretty freaking hard. Gregg Popovich is maybe the best coach to ever grasp a clipboard, and even he decided it was too much. Pop was originally brought in as an executive to run the San Antonio Spurs, but in 1996 he fired then-coach Bob Hill and took over coaching responsibilities.

By 2002, he apparently decided doing both jobs was too much, and ceded personnel control to R.C. Buford. The Spurs won a title with Popovich wearing both hats, but there’s no telling if San Antonio collects their next four rings if Pop was tasked with both roles for all of the last decade and a half.

In addition to being simply difficult, being a head coach is stressful. As fellow contributor to The Step Back, Derek James, has pointed out, the stress of being a head coach led to multiple coaches taking absences to manage their health. Adding the additional burden of controlling the roster must only increase the mental load these people have to deal with.

While the idea of one person calling all of the shots both on the floor and in the front office might be romantic, NBA teams are currently trending in the opposite direction. Teams employ staff members that would have been unthinkable in the past, from analytics experts to nutritionists to shot doctors. If getting players to take the right shots and eat the right things are tasks deserving of their own specialist, then certainly picking which players are doing the shooting and eating does too.

It’s not like running a team is getting any easier as time goes on, either. With the NBA G League becoming closer and closer to a true minor league, front offices have to keep more players than ever on their radars.

Those G League teams have their own front offices, but two-way players are controlled by the NBA, and it’s a sure bet that NBA teams have a very good idea of how their G League rosters are working out. The G League getting better means yet another non-NBA league that executives must keep an eye on.

Imagine asking one person to deal directly with players, draw up schemes for opponents, oversee practices, stay up-to-date on scouting that covers the NBA, the G League, the NCAA, and all of the many talent-rich leagues outside of the United States, and field trade calls from other teams, among various other responsibilities. It’s just too much.

Even if it wasn’t too much, coaches think differently than executives. Coaches have to focus on winning games immediately. Their livelihood depends on it. Executives want to win, sure, but they generally think about both the now and the later. (The good ones do, at least.) The Process would have never happened if Brett Brown was calling the shots in Philly this whole time, and that’s not a knock on him!

Next: Why is shot selection so important?

The temptation of trading future assets for a quick shot in the arm is high in coaches with personnel responsibility. The Griffin trade is one example. Doc Rivers‘ time wearing both hats for the Los Angeles Clippers is rife with more of them.

Between actual documented evidence and simple logic, it’s pretty plain to see that giving one person control of both coaching and the roster is a bad idea. No matter how tempting the name of the coach involved is, it just isn’t worth it for the team in question.