Derek Fisher, Magic Johnson and the 10 worst head-coaching hires in NBA history

A good head coach can change everything. Greg Popovich took a small-market team in Texas, built around Tim Duncan, and won five championships. We know that Michael Jordan is the GOAT, but he doesn’t get there without Phil Jackson. Red Auerbach has Bill Russell in the record books for championships. Great coaches can have arguably as big an impact on a championship team as a star player. 

A bad coaching hire could have the same impact on the opposite side of the spectrum. Now, there are bad coaching hires every year. Sometimes, coaches don’t live up to the hype, or the hire was flawed from the start. That can be okay, and teams can get out of those hirings pretty quickly. 

And then, there are the devastating hires that ruin franchises. Whether it’s a tenure that ends in scandal or just an incredibly flawed process that sets the franchise back a decade or more. These hirings ruined teams. 

10. Chauncey Billups, Portland Trail Blazers, 2021-2025

This one is obviously still developing, but the Portland Trail Blazers thought they were getting the ultimate professional when they hired Chauncey Billups. The former star point guard saw his star rise very quickly. He was only an assistant coach for the Los Angeles Clippers for one year before the Portland Trail Blazers hired him as their head coach in 2021. 

The Blazers were embroiled in a rebuild after they wasted the Damien Lillard era. Unfortunately, Billups did not raise the team’s ceiling. The team was constantly in the basement of the NBA, but they weren’t winning the NBA Draft Lottery. So, they were bad, and they were missing on transcendent stars. 

Billups had a career high of 36 wins in 2024-25, so things were slightly looking up. This team still felt far away, but at least the coach was learning in his fourth year. Then, the gambling scandal hit. Billups was arrested for, among other things, the allegations that he was running card game scams. It’s one of the biggest gambling scandals in league history, and it puts a black eye on the Blazers organization. We don’t know the long-term impacts of Billups’ decisions, but we do believe this will have a ripple effect on the franchise for the next decade. 

9. Larry Brown, New York Knicks, 2005-2006

Larry Brown got his first head coaching job in 1969 when he took over at Davidson. He was hired by the New York Knicks in 2005. The first man to win a championship in college and the NBA was expected to bring that expertise to Madison Square Garden. As you’ll see with the Knicks multiple times, this didn’t work out at all.

Brown was a coach who had seen the game pass him by. He needed a very specific type of team to succeed, and that was the Detroit Pistons. That was not the Knicks. Brown spent most of his time fighting with his own players, both in the locker room and through the press. His biggest rivalry was with Stephon Marbury, who was his point guard.

The Knicks won 23 games in his first season, and he was immediately fired. It was so bad that the Knicks tried to renege on the agreement to pay him the remainder of his contract, arguing that he was fired with cause. They tried to withhold $40 million. In the end, they did save more than $20 million, giving Brown $18.5 million to go away. That’s almost an extra $1 million per win in his only season in New York.

8. John Beilein, Cleveland Cavaliers, 2019-2020

There are quite a few examples of amazing college coaches who became terrible professional coaches. There aren’t many as bad as John Beilein. He was known as a development coach who took struggling programs and made them great. He did that at Richmond, West Virginia, and Michigan. In theory, he had enough experience to bring that mindset to the NBA.

Unfortunately, he brought more than a college mindset to the Cleveland Cavaliers. He brought a college system that just didn’t work. He focused on the fundamentals, which on paper sounds good, but that’s not how an NBA offense works. He didn’t give himself much time to learn.

Beilein was in the league for just a few months. That’s right, he was done with the team in the middle of the season. He was just the third first-year head coach (outside of interim or midseason replacements) to fail to finish the season, resigning in February. The Cavaliers did pivot quickly and have been in better shape, but this was an insane failure of a hiring. It went so bad that Beilein never returned to a head coaching position for the rest of his career (so far). This impacted his career more than anyone else's.

7. Luke Walton, Sacramento Kings, 2019-2021

Honestly, we could choose either Luke Walton’s tenure with the Los Angeles Lakers or his tenure with the Sacramento Kings. His existence forced Magic Johnson to leave the organization because he wanted him fired. Johnson seems like one of the biggest figures in sports, but Walton got him out. Still, his tenure with the Kings was insane. 

Let’s rewind just a bit. Walton was considered by far the best coaching candidate due to his impact on the dynasty Golden State Warriors. His work under Steve Kerr was incredible, but the hype never followed him when he was the man in charge. In Sacramento, we already had a taste of how it didn’t work, but they felt like they were getting a good coach on a discount.

Instead, his tenure with the Kings was much like the Kings franchise in general. It had very little success but a ton of controversies. What’s worse is that the Kings were finally looking better going into that season. Then, they went in reverse. Back-to-back 31-win seasons put Walton on thin ice. The resignation of Vlade Divac made it worse. He started the 2020-21 season 6-11, and the Kings were done. This failure extended the Kings' playoff drought, and now they are in the same bad position as they’ve been for a while. 

6. Kurt Rambis, Minnesota Timberwolves, 2009-2011

Kurt Rambis has 100 more losses than wins in his Minnesota Timberwolves tenure. He was only there for two years! There was actual progress coming in for this franchise, and he halted it in its tracks. Jonny Flynn was a promising rookie (that’s a weird sentence to say). Kevin Love was a legitimate star, and he paired well with Al Jefferson in the front court. Michael Beasley was trying to grow into his role. This team was built pretty well from a pure talent standpoint, but boy, did it fall off the rails quickly. 

The Timberwolves won 15 games with that roster. Rambis was insistent on running the Triangle offense, which is famously hard to learn. He had a roster that should have won, but instead, he plugged them into an awkward and complicated offensive system. He could have literally sat on the bench and done nothing, and we believe that the Wolves would have a much better record. 

Many will say this was a roster issue, but we just don’t agree. Yes, the development was awful for these players, but that’s mostly on Rambis. There is a different universe where Flynn, Beasley, and 2010 fourth-overall pick Wesley Johnson grow into great players and the Timberwolves are actual contenders in the mid-2010s. Instead, they all busted out, and Rambis was out of a job by 2011. He did get a brief interim stint with the Knicks, but that ended just as terribly.

5. Jim Boylen, Chicago Bulls, 2018-2020

There are head coaches that fans think came in and didn’t do a good job, but we wouldn’t go so far as to say the fans “hated” those coaches. Chicago Bulls fans HATE Jim Boylen. To this day, if you bring up his name in the Windy City, it will be returned with a savage response. Boylen was bad at everything, and he did it with a terrible demeanor. 

Was he bad at Xs and Os on the court? Yes. Was he bad at relationships with his players? Yes. Was he bad with the media? Of course. It’s a miracle this guy got through the interview process. Someone who spent so much time working for Gregg Popovich would be expected to be more professional. Instead, he was an unmitigated disaster. Some of the bad things he did made little to no sense, like when he failed to call a timeout after Daniel Gafford got hurt, forcing Rick Carlisle, who was the Mavs head coach, to call the timeout himself.

His players hated him, and the fans hated him. On top of everything, the Bulls stunk and the development didn’t exist. There are times when a team needs a hard-nosed head coach to get the best out of them. Boylen wasn’t hard-nosed. He was a demon to his team. Ironically, he now works for Carlisle with the Indiana Pacers.

4. Derek Fisher, New York Knicks, 2014-2016

Derek Fisher has to be combined with the era of Phil Jackson as an executive. For how good a coach Jackson was, he was that bad as an executive. Jackson returned to the New York Knicks on a massive contract to run the ship. Owner James Dolan wanted the big name and gave him $12 million per season to throw them completely off course. Jackson refused to hire a head coach who ran anything but the Triangle offense. It just didn’t work in this era. 

Then, despite having no coaching experience, he gave his former point guard, Derek Fisher, a five-year deal worth $25 million total. They both got a big win to start, re-signing Carmelo Anthony, but they then tried to make him work in an offense that didn’t work for his style. Anthony was an ISO player who thrived with the ball in his hands. So, the natural thing to do was to take the ball out of his hands. 

In less than two seasons, Fisher won less than 30% of his games as head coach. He was fired and never got another head coaching job in the NBA. He had a short stint as the head coach of the Los Angeles Sparks, but that ended in disaster, as well. Now, Fisher is the head coach of a high school team, but he’ll always have that $25 million in salary for 40 wins to fall back on.

3. David Fizdale, New York Knicks, 2018-2019

It’s crazy how hard a time the Knicks had hiring coaches for Carmelo Anthony, an eventual Hall of Famer and the best player they had on the team since Patrick Ewing. It was a masterclass in blowing a superstar’s prime. David Fizdale was by far the worst of the hires because of the logic behind it, in that there was no logic. Fizdale’s experience prior to that amounted to a year and some change with the Memphis Grizzlies, where he was fired after a public benching of his star center, Marc Gasol. 

With the Knicks, Fizdale went 21-83. That amounts to a winning percentage below 20%. This is New York, the Mecca of basketball, and Madison Square Garden, the World’s Most Famous Arena. How could it be possible to be this bad? Fizdale claims he was instructed to tank, but they even lost out on Ja Morant and Zion Williamson, taking instead RJ Barrett. 

This was also when Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving left the Knicks empty-handed and chose to join the Nets. Fizdale watched as the Knicks were forced to pivot to Julius Randle, who actually grew into a respectable player under Mike Miller and Tom Thibodeau. Fizdale has held multiple assistant jobs, but his only head coaching opportunity came when he was recently appointed to lead Nigeria’s international basketball team. Many would consider that an indictment on Fizdale as a coach, who has the worst record in Knicks history.

2. Magic Johnson, Los Angeles Lakers, 1994

When Magic Johnson was forced to retire due to his HIV diagnosis, it dropped one of the game’s all-time greats near the end of his prime. He was only 32 years old in 1991, and there would have likely been a lot left in the tank. When he played in the All-Star Game and with the Dream Team at the 1992 Summer Olympics, it was clear he was still one of the best in the world despite his disease. 

When his comeback ended, Johnson was asked by Jerry Buss to return to the Lakers as head coach. They moved on from Randy Pfund, and Johnson was initially successful. They won five of their first six games. Then, they lost 10 in a row. Then, Johnson announced he was resigning after the season. 

Johnson would eventually return as a player in 1996 for a short stint to show he could still play, but the coaching hire was a bad idea from the start. Heck, he had played with more than half the team by the time he was named head coach. The Lakers were just trying to do something to add some juice to the roster, but this was a guy still grieving the sudden end to his career. He didn’t even take a salary for the position. The Lakers-Magic coaching debacle didn’t last long, but it delayed the inevitable move to Del Harris, who would win Coach of the Year the next season. 

1. Rick Pitino, Boston Celtics, 1997-2001

The Boston Celtics have done so much right in their history, but the move to hire Rick Pitino and give him full control of basketball operations set them back for years. In the post-Larry Bird era, Pitino made some sense. He had NBA experience, leading the New York Knicks in the 1980s, but that era ended strangely after just two years. After almost a decade at Kentucky, Pitino was back coaching professional basketball.

Pitino’s record isn’t the worst on this list (102–146), but the time he was given and the impact on the future of an all-time franchise earn him the number-one spot. He famously said after a last-second loss to Vince Carter and the Toronto Raptors that “Larry Bird is not walking through that door. Kevin McHale is not walking through that door, and Robert Parish is not walking through that door.”

While we all agree the Celtics had to move forward, he was the guy in charge of moving them forward. He was in complete control, and he was as far from a fit to the city of Boston as can be. He alienated players, tried to rule with an iron fist, and had an overall terrible outlook on the franchise. The pressure clearly got to Pitino pretty quickly in his tenure, and a divorce was imminent. 

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