Dumars finally found out what the rest of the league already knew. Namely that Flip Saunders is not a good postseason coach. His teams are usually great during the regular season but they choke in the playoffs.

Betting against history is NEVER a good thing, and that’s exactly what Dumars did. History won again as Saunders took a team that went to the finals on consecutive times - winning once - and was unable to get them past the Eastern Conference Finals. This despite having the best overall winning percentage in 2006, the best winning percentage in the East (4th overall) in 2007, and 2nd overall in 2008.

Who will the Pistons name as their next head-coach ? If they’re smart, they will pick Terry Porter despite already granting the Suns 2 interviews with him. Or they could chose from a number of young assistant coaches.

Meanwhile there already are people painting Saunders as a candidate for the Suns job. If the Suns are smart and they paid any attention in history class, they will stay clear of him. The past 24 NBA titles are shared between KC Jones, Pat Riley, Chuck Daly, Phil Jackson, Rudy Tomjanovic, Gregg Popovich and Larry Brown. That’s 7 coaches that won the title in the past 24 years. In the past 17 years, with Phil Jackson  and Gregg Popovich dominating, there were only 3 other coaches that got a title: Larry Brown (who might be considered some sort of a fluke as the Pistons met a completely dysfunctional Lakers team), Rudy T and Riley.

In other words, coaches that have been recycled over and over and over again don’t win titles. Most coaches that won a title did so in their first 4-5 years on the job, so if your goal is winning a title, you have better chances if you try with a new young coach than with someone like Flip Saunders. Or Doug Collins for that matter.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Stupid GMs, Stupid coaches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.