When Jerry Sloan announced his retirement on February 10th, 2011 a lot of the talk focused on his unusually long (in NBA terms) tenure with the Utah Jazz. In a league where coaching changes are often the easiest way to shake things up, Jerry Sloan and the Jazz managed to maintain a historic and successful relationship. In honor of his retirement and in the interest of exploring how unique his situation was we put together a visualization examining coaching volatility and success through the duration of Sloan’s coaching tenure (1979 – 2010) and for all 30 teams.
The graph above is broken up by years. Each block represents one season. If a team had more than one coach then the block is broken up into slices. The intensity of the color maps to winning percentage with darker colors representing a higher win percentage. The black lines indicate a coaching change and the teams are ordered by number of coaches. Hover over the box to see the year/coach/record.
We’ve all heard the staggering numbers of coaches that have come and gone since Jerry Sloan began his tenure with the Utah Jazz. We wanted to to put something together that helped visualize just how impressive that run was. Only The Charlotte Bobcats have as few coaches as the Jazz over this time span, and they’ve only been in the league since 2004. The next fewest on the list doubles this amount with 6 different coaches (Houston and Miami).
One of the things we really enjoyed about putting this together is seeing other prominent coaches over the same span. Being able to compare the years and success of guys like Rudy Tomjanovich (Hou), Phil Jackson (Chi, Lal), Gregg Popovich (Sas), Chuck Daly (Det) and Pat Riley (Lal) is really cool. It’s also interesting to note the transitions in terms of a team slumping (or not) and the coach being replaced. It’s often said that teams experience a short term bump by bringing in a new face. We had expected to see this play out in the graph but it’s not as obvious as we had thought. One possible explanation is that these short terms bumps are just that, more like 5-10 games than a whole season.
Other interesting notes:
- Los Angelas Clippers share the title of most coaching changes since ’79. Win percentage seems to reflect that.
- Miami Heat Van Gundy / Pat Riley incident is pretty noticeable.
- More than any other organization Phil Jackson stands head and shoulders above all other Bulls coaches (Thanks MJ).
- For a young organization the Memphis Grizzles have had a substantial number of coaches. Is their record a reflection of that, or a result of?
What’s interesting to you?
From the post title I thought the post might be about coaching win volatility across the league directly against Sloan. I’d be interested in that for Sloan or other long-time coaches.
Crow:
That does sound interesting. We’ll have to put something together around that.
Glad you are interested in pursuing the idea. For some match-ups the top vet Coach may moderately or greatly dominate and stay that way. Against some opponents their advantage might get chipped way or suddenly shift though you might have to measure in multi-season blocks to reduce the noise. Which coaches and which types of teams turn the tide and turn the tide first would be interesting to see.
Maybe moving multi-season averages are the way to go, perhaps variably weighted more to emphasize recent results.
I agree with Crow. I thought this was going to reflect how well opposing coaches have fared against Sloan. It’s cool to see how coaching as a whole reflects the progression of the team over those years, but in honour of a great basketball mind, it would have been even more interesting to see how other greats matched up directly with him. Nonetheless, I’m impressed with the logistics and the work you guys put in; as this is my first visit to the site.
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