NBA needs to address racial disparity in its coaching and leadership

The ranks of NBA general managers and head coaches became less diverse this offseason, at a time where the league’s players are pushing for racial justice and equality. That’s a problem.

For a league that prides itself on progressive attitudes towards racial justice, it’s time for the NBA to look inward.

As the NBA’s coaching carousel comes to a rest, with nine head coaching changes this offseason, the NBA will enter the 2020-21 season with just seven Black head coaches. That’s one fewer than they had at the end of last season and just half of the 14 Black head coaches the NBA had at its peak in 2012-13.

In a 30-team league where 80 percent of the players are Black and one known for its progressive attitudes towards racial justice and a fanbase with the highest percentage of Black viewers in American sports — this is a disturbing trend.

Since the end of last season, Alvin Gentry, Jacque Vaughn, and Nate McMillan have been replaced with Tyronn Lue and Stephen Silas in the Black head coaching ranks. Meanwhile, out of the 19 assistant coaches with head coaching experience in the NBA, 12 are Black, which adds up given that Black head coaches are statistically given less margin for error and are less likely to earn second or third chances than white ones, as Tom Thibodeau just did in New York.

Plus, the NBA’s lack of diversity extends beyond its coaching ranks: there are nine Black general managers in the league, but just four have the final say in basketball-related decisions, with Toronto Raptors’ Masai Ujiri being the only Black president of basketball operations. The NBA league office is staffed with 39.4 percent people of color, according to the most recent report from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, which outpaces other sports leagues but is still unrepresentative of the players who make the business viable.

This is all to say that the NBA has a lack of diversity problem within its leadership and head coaching ranks, and they know it.

In June, a coalition of NBA players led by Avery Bradley and Kyrie Irving demanded the league “improved [its] hiring practices for black front-office and head-coaching candidates — making it so the league’s management better reflects its composition of players.” The NBA and its players’ union later released a statement that said “strategies to increase Black representation across the NBA and its teams” had come up in their discussions about social justice.

In July, the NBA named Oris Stuart its first-ever “chief people and inclusion officer,” aimed at codifying policies to hire more people of color in and around the league. There was progress in the front office department, with three teams hiring Black executives to be their general managers this summer — Troy Weaver in Detroit, Marc Eversley in Chicago, and Calvin Booth in Denver — but the lack of Black people being promoted to lead coaching roles is an ongoing concern that is trending in the opposite direction.

“I know we can do better,” Adam Silver told reporters in late September about the lack of diversity among head coaches, saying that the NBA has been in discussion with teams that have openings to make sure they have a diverse set of candidates. Silver even said the NBA has looked into a Rooney Rule-type parameter for diverse coach hiring, but wanted to see what teams with vacancies would do first.

Why are there so few NBA head coaches and general managers of color?

Well, in the months since then we have witnessed a reversion to the status quo, with Silas being the only first-time Black head coach to get an opportunity (and look at the grim situation he is inheriting). This is problematic for a number of reasons, especially when you consider the modern NBA’s increasingly consequential role in American culture.

There is, now more than ever, a need for Black leadership in the NBA. As the NBA becomes an increasingly political league with an increasingly powerful ability to effect change, having coaches and executives who represent the players, are politically active, and are willing to use their platforms to speak up would add to the collective power of the league. It would also take pressure off the players, who are having trouble working double-time as players and activists.

While coaches such as Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich provide great quotes, they could never speak for NBA players the same way a guy like Doc Rivers can. Rivers, for all his on-court shortcomings in the NBA bubble, was a crucial presence for the players, taking some of the pressure off of them by speaking out against racism and police brutality in America.

There is also the issue of on-court chemistry. As former NBA player Etan Thomas wrote for The Undefeated, “It is invaluable for players to have a coach who can relate to [the players]. I’m not suggesting that all white coaches have issues relating to Black players. But in my personal experience in the NBA, that was definitely the case.”

Thomas describes his experiences playing under both Doug Collins, who is white, and Eddie Jordan, who is Black, explaining that while Collins was nervous around him and had trouble relating to Black players on the team, Jordan developed a relationship with him simply by asking about life.

“And that translated on the court as well,” Thomas writes. “Because of our communication during games, what he specifically wanted out of my position and the role he wanted me to play… I was able to trust him and implement exactly what he wanted. That resulted in me being the preferred center despite being 4 or 5 inches shorter than our starting center. All that happened because of communication and trust.”

There are a number of reasons Black people have had trouble making their way up the NBA coaching hierarchy — most of which have less to do with their faults and more to do with the inherent advantage white people are born with.

For starters, NBA organizations — with all their prestige and popularity — have historically taken advantage of the opportunity to exploit workers at the bottom of the totem pole. For every glamorized story of a Masai Ujiri who started as unpaid scout and made his way to the top, there are thousands more Black people who had to give up on their dream — not because they lacked talent or conviction, but because they didn’t have the safety net required to work full-time hours with little or no pay.

There is also the issue of Black coaches being put in boxes. In an era where analytics reign, these boxes can be extremely hard to break out of.

“I think young Black assistants are oftentimes slotted into this category of players’ coach, the communicator,” says former New York Knicks head coach David Fizdale. “It’s a delicate dance for a Black coach because the same thing they might ask you to do on your staff when it comes to getting close to players, that can be used against you when it’s time to hire a head coach.”

“Blacks aren’t a monolithic group. They don’t give us the same chances or look at each individual case,” a high-ranking African American executive told Yahoo Sports. “Blacks are put in position, historically, that they have to take the worst circumstances and make it right in the short period of time.”

“One black guy gets a shot to hold a position, if he fails then the establishment looks at it and says black guys can’t do that. White counterparts fail and fail up all the time, and get replaced by more white guys.”

While these are subjective opinions, the fact is that NBA teams are now more likely to seek out unconventional hires, whether that be college coaches, first-time coaches, foreign coaches, broadcasters, former video coordinators, or even Twitter personalities. Meanwhile, as Howard Beck wrote in 2015, organizations are “turning away from the conventional pool of former players-turned-coaches, a pool that is, by definition, predominantly Black.”

In fact, as recently as 2010, two-thirds of NBA head coaches had significant NBA playing careers. Today that number is down to eight.

So, what can the NBA do to create a more diverse environment within its coaching ranks?

First of all, the league and its organizations need more Black executives in positions of power in order to make hiring decisions. As Dr. Todd Boyd, a professor of race and popular culture at the University of Southern California, put it: “You look at any entity in our society. When people make hiring decisions, they often hire people they know. They hire their friends. They hire people who their friends recommend. So the sort of social circle that’s involved in making these sorts of decisions are also potentially biased in terms of race. Because if you’re not part of the right social circle, then those opportunities aren’t going to come for you.”

The NBA can help create this environment by enacting a Rooney Rule-type parameter that encourages equal opportunities by mandating teams to interview ethnic minorities for head coaching and executive positions. This is something the players’ union can push for in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations in 2023 or 2024 (depending on if they opt-out) — the players’ strike in the bubble proved that they have the leverage and power to make demands from ownership that benefit the Black community.

In the meantime, star players can advocate for Black coaches to get head coaching jobs, following the template that Kobe Bryant used to get Byron Scott in Los Angeles and LeBron James used to get Lue in Cleveland.

These are just a few solutions, but the NBA has shown the ability to solve significant problems when they come together with a common goal. The racial disparity in the NBA’s leadership and coaching circles is a significant problem, and the clock is ticking for the league to address it.