Tyronn Lue, Progress, and the Coaching Carousel
Judging coaching acumen is a lot tougher than we think.
Progress is not linear.
That goes not just for life but also on a basketball court for players and coaches alike.
Players get criticized for their perceived lack of progress, not just on a year-by-year basis but on a game-by-game or even a quarter-by-quarter basis.
As for coaches, the one you saw at the helm yesterday might be different from the one you see today, as it pertains to a whole host of factors. Things change — the feel for the game changes on a night-to-night basis; the confidence in the players at their disposal ebbs and flows.
But one thing seems to have remained the same, at least as far as this offseason goes: the people on the sidelines.
Sure, the coaching carousel is in full effect as it spins from stop to stop, throwing a coach here, another one there. But by and large, the names and faces are ones we’ve all seen recently.
Nick Nurse was fired by the Toronto Raptors and ended up with the Philadelphia 76ers, who had fired Doc Rivers after another failed postseason experience.
Monty Williams was fired by the Phoenix Suns and wound up signing a massive six-year, $72 million deal with the Detroit Pistons, who had an opening after Dwane Casey resigned from his post to go into Detroit’s front office. Williams’ deal can reportedly jump up even as high as eight years and $100 million, per Shams Charania of The Athletic.
Ime Udoka was hired by the Houston Rockets shortly after the season ended, replacing Stephen Silas. Udoka led the Boston Celtics to the 2022 NBA Finals. Even Quin Snyder returned after a few months’ hiatus to coach the Atlanta Hawks after taking over for Nate McMillan in late February.
The only first-time head coach that has been hired by a team since the beginning of the season is Adrian Griffin, whom the Milwaukee Bucks hired away from the Toronto Raptors. The Raptors have their head coaching vacancy to sort out still.
At the time of this writing, only two open jobs remain: the aforementioned Raptors gig and the Suns, who, as mentioned, parted ways with Williams before Williams signed with Detroit for what is set to be the largest coaching contract in NBA history, per ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
Some of the coaches you see patrolling the sidelines in the NBA are in their second or third, or sometimes fourth, stop. (Sidenote: if Doc Rivers gets hired by the Phoenix Suns, it’ll be the fourth team he’s coached in the last decade alone.)
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. After all, they’re the best of the best at what they do, no matter what fans think of them on a nightly basis. It’s a hard job. Seldom do they get anywhere near the credit they deserve, and routinely they get all the blame when it goes poorly.
Fans oftentimes only see coaches for 48 minutes a few nights a week. They don’t see the meticulous regimen that they go through to prepare for games or practices. They aren’t privy to the endless hours of studying to find a thing here or a thing there that might be the slim difference between winning and losing.
In a lot of ways, coaching is a thankless job. The clock is always ticking against you. One bad night at the office has fans calling for your job, barking about “adjustments” and other platitudes that sound great but offer no real insight into what usually took place.
But all of this brings us back to the original point: progress is not linear. Not even for coaches. And that’s where LA Clippers coach Tyronn Lue comes into the equation.
The 2022-23 season was not Lue’s best work, but a few cards were stacked against him from the beginning — namely, the inability to have his two superstars available as much as he would have liked.
Paul George and Kawhi Leonard played in 38 out of a possible 87 games together, amounting to 43.7 percent of the team’s total games this season. The team spent 15 games without either player available.
Their lack of availability also played a factor in how flimsy and unreliable their ‘small-ball’ lineups — combinations that Lue loved to use — could be at times throughout the season.
In the 38 games that both George and Leonard played, the Clippers posted a plus-11.4 Net Rating in 222 minutes when both players were on the floor without a traditional center, per PBPStats.
Essentially, the Clippers played six minutes per game without a center on the floor while both stars were out there, and those results were tremendously positive for a large swath of time. But it all changed once at least one of the two stars had to miss time, and it left that wing-heavy lineup without the necessary firepower to make it potent enough to withstand the opposition on most nights.
The Clippers posted a plus-3.0 Net Rating in the 486 minutes that they spent without a traditional center on the floor but had at least one of George or Leonard out there, and that number cratered to a minus-6.2 Net Rating in 218 minutes when both stars sat.
To make matters more confounding, the Clippers had just 26 total games in which George, Leonard, and Norman Powell — the team’s three leading scorers from this past season — all played.
Still, despite the lack of continuity presented to both him and the team, Lue was able to guide the Clippers to the Western Conference’s 5-seed thanks in large part to a late-season push that saw the team go 11-5 over their final 16 contests.
That doesn’t mean Lue didn’t have his issues, though.
There were times he stuck too long with certain options, but they were decisions made with the thought that struggling players would bounce back to a more normal form rather than the downturn they were mired in, and rather than “lose” them from a mental perspective, he chose to ride them as their confidence hopefully returned. Sometimes it paid off, other times it didn’t.
Terance Mann should have remained in the starting lineup, even after the team acquired guard Russell Westbrook from the league’s buyout market. But the stars and Lue preferred Westbrook’s veteran presence, according to sources not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
At the end of the day, you can’t upset the apple cart. What the stars want, they will usually get. That’s how it works, for the most part, in this league.
It was a down season for Lue on the court as he also dealt with his own personal issues off of it. In an interview with The Pivot Podcast released in late March, Lue detailed that he lost seven family members since December. However, Lue didn’t take time off from coaching to travel back and attend any of the funerals.
Before a home game in December, Lue came into the locker room with a basketball and passed it to a seated Moussa Diabate before quizzing the rookie on defensive coverages and what his responsibilities were on offense if the opposing defense played the pick-and-roll certain ways.
Always teaching, always trying to further development. It’s what coaches do.
When asked about the terminology difference for the same play — for instance, the ‘Spain pick-and-roll’ can be referred to as ‘Snap’ or ‘Stack’ — Lue quipped that all the teams “run the same s---” but try to disguise it with different phrases to keep the opposition guessing. That includes changing the verbiage with regularity.
It’s a constant chess match, which is why the shuffling of coaches from job to job shouldn’t be all too shocking, especially this offseason when so many teams with high expectations flamed out disappointingly. They’re all chess masters searching for their next board to conquer.
It’s also what makes coaching truly tough to evaluate for the most part. It oftentimes requires you to take a macro view rather than a micro one.
Lue led the Clippers to their first-ever Western Conference finals appearance, and all he’s known since then is uncertainty on a near night-to-night basis thanks to injuries, illnesses, and anything else you can think of.
Put in different terms: Lue has coached 24 playoff games with the Clippers. He’s had both George and Leonard for only 11 of them. That means he’s coached more playoff games without both stars than with them.
That brings us to the elephant in the room.
Lue has two years remaining on his initial five-year, $35 million deal, but the second of those two seasons, which comes in 2024-25, is not guaranteed, as was first reported by Andrew Greif of the LA Times. Lue was seen as a big-time candidate for the Phoenix Suns this offseason, and while the Phoenix job is still open, it appears that the Suns are down to three candidates: Doc Rivers, Frank Vogel, and Phoenix assistant Kevin Young, according to Arizona Sports’ John Gambadoro.
Despite overtures from a vocal minority within the fanbase that he be ousted, it does appear, barring any last-minute changes, that Lue will indeed begin the 2023-24 season with the Clippers as the two sides look to continue their partnership.
But Lue will want more job security than his present deal currently allows him, and with Williams earning a record-shattering $12 million per year, it at least gives Lue a target to aim for in any negotiations that may or may not begin with the Clippers over the next little while.
Lue does have a championship ring, guiding the Cleveland Cavaliers to the 2016 title. That would make him more sought after than a lot of other potential coaching candidates should he hit the open market. It’s something the Clippers will have to consider, especially with few options presenting themselves within the current marketplace.
Should Lue depart, the successor is likely to be Clippers associate head coach Dan Craig, according to sources not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Craig was hired in November 2020, shortly after Lue took the main job.
However, there’s a long way to go between then and now, and the coaching carousel does appear to be somewhat slowing down at this point with just the Toronto and Phoenix jobs left vacant.
Still, Lue appears on track to continue the job. And the progress he and a whole host of others so desperately crave will be the thing to watch this upcoming season.