There's no such thing as a championship coach

Tom Ziller

04 Jun 2025 — 5 min read

The Shipwreck of Don Juan; Eugene Delacroix; 1840

Good morning. Tom Thibodeau has been fired by the Knicks after the most successful season in a quarter-century for the franchise. Whether it was merited or not, the idea that a team with Thibodeau as head coach could never win a title is absurd. Plus: we have some links on Finals Eve. Let's basketball.

The Knicks fired Tom Thibodeau on Tuesday. This wasn't a total surprise – Thibodeau was on shaky ground going into the playoffs, and apparently he couldn't survive what Knicks brass thought was a real chance to make the Finals and compete for a title. I thought he'd availed himself well enough in the postseason to remain at the helm; that the leaders closest to the situation thought differently is totally reasonable. There have been murmurs about Mikal Bridges' role under Thibodeau, and no franchise is better equipped to understand what other coaches are in play and what their key players think about ... well, everything. It's part of the upside of the Knicks' unconventional front office as well as having the star's father on the coaching staff. Leon Rose and the crew are working with as close to full information as you're going to get in the NBA. One suspects they will not a traditional hiring process. One suspects they already know who their next head coach will be. So there's a level of deference I'm willing to afford.

What it's much, much harder to afford is legitimacy to the idea that there are "championship coaches" and that Thibodeau cannot be one.

Where does this idea come from, that certain players or coaches are capable of achieving the NBA's ultimate greatness and others are not regardless of context? What defines an inability to "win the big one" other than having not won the big one? What strikes me is that this is the type of thing that will be said about coaches of certain styles up until the moment they win a title. And then what? Did they suddenly become a championship coach? Did the Basketball Gods make an exception and grant them access to the hallowed halls of Red Auerbach's palace in the sky? What is it exactly about a coach that makes them unworthy of a championship?

What team has Tom Thibodeau coached that should have won the championship? The Derrick Rose-Joakim Noah Bulls teams, whose reign was cut short by Rose's injury and who were blocked by the Heatles? The Jimmy Butler-Karl Towns Timberwolves teams, whose "reign" was cut short by Butler's meltdown? These Knicks, who crushed the reigning champs but fell short to the Pacers?

Had Frank Vogel not won the championship in 2020, he would absolutely be tagged as "not a championship coach." Had Mike Budenholzer not won the championship in 2021, he would absolutely be tagged as "not a championship coach." What about Doc Rivers? No coach takes more heat that Doc Rivers. He won a championship in 2008. Imagine the criticism had he not!

Ty Lue has a championship as coach because LeBron didn't like David Blatt; ergo, Ty Lue is a championship coach, despite his Clippers teams falling short of glory every season he's been there. Erik Spoelstra is widely regarded as the best coach in the NBA. His two titles came with (to that point) the most stacked team of the millennium. If Pat Riley had remained on the sidelines for that stretch and Spo had been his deputy until 2014, and everything had played out the same way since, would we be treating Spoelstra as though he could not win at the highest stage? Because that's exactly how he was talked about until 2012. Just as LeBron and Chris Bosh were talked about as being incapable of rising to a championship level as players.

Yes, players are talked about like this as well. Dirk Nowitzki is the biggest example. Losing four straight games in the 2006 NBA Finals and shooting 39% from the floor in the series was the first knock on Nowitzki. Winning 67 games, the MVP and crashing out in the first round the next season was a premature nail in the coffin. Dirk immediately stopped being taken seriously as a winning player (despite all the wins that made the losses shocking). That is, until the context of the team around him changed dramatically in 2011 and he got revenge over the Heat. The view of Nowitzki changed overnight. A player largely considered "not a championship player" became one through some stroke of fate or magic, according to the lore. In reality, he got Jason Kidd and Tyson Chandler and his teammates played out-of-their-minds defense and the Heat melted down.

His coach in that series, Rick Carlisle, is another perfect example of the "not a championship coach" trope. Remember, Carlisle had been run out of Detroit after two 50-win seasons only for Larry Brown to swoop in and win a title with the Pistons in 2004. Carlisle took over the Pacers at that point, and watched a championship-caliber Indiana team melt down after Malice. He took over the Mavericks following Avery Johnson's dismissal. The critiques were loud after his second season in Dallas, in which the Mavericks won 55 games and were the No. 2 seed but got booted out of the first round by the Spurs (who got swept a round later). Then 2011 happened. Now, Carlisle doesn't get the "not a championship coach" knock that would have haunted him otherwise.

My question with this type of assertion is always a counterfactual. For example, if you put this coach in charge of the current best team in the NBA, do you think they'd win the championship? If they are not a championship coach, then the answer has to be no. If you put Tom Thibodeau (or Taylor Jenkins or Mike Brown or Jason Kidd or J.B. Bickerstaff or Quin Snyder, pick one) in charge of the Thunder, do you think they'd still win the title? (Don't answer that, Pacers fans.)

If you say yes to any or all of those coaches, then you can't claim them to be "not a championship coach."

Again, this is not to say that Thibodeau's dismissal is wrong or unfair. The same applies to the cannings of Michael Malone (a championship coach) and Mike Budenholzer (a championship coach) and Jenkins (not a championship coach): front offices have reasons and information and outlooks that go way beyond the most simplistic public arguments about an individual's ability to do their job well enough to achieve the ultimate glory. This is an attack not on a lack of faith in individual coaches in individual situations. This is an attack on a public discourse that decants highly contextual situations into binary judgments of broad capability. We don't really know what makes a champion just like we don't know what makes a championship coach, and pretending we do fools ourselves and each other.

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