Steve Kerr had a grand vision for his first day as an NBA head coach, a magnificently scripted itinerary of drills and schemes and sets, of conceptual X’s and O’s that would soon transform Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green into contenders. Oh, did he have plans. Soon to be followed by mild panic.
There were maybe 10 items on the list that fall day in 2014, Kerr recalls. “And you get through three of them. And you realize, ‘We gotta let these guys go. It’s time for practice to end.’ And then you go home, and you go, ‘What am I going to do? I didn’t get seven things in! Like we’re falling behind.’”
Kerr chuckles, then summons an old Mike Tyson quote: “You come in with a plan—and then you get punched in the mouth.”
It’s not that Kerr lacked an understanding of the NBA. He’d played 15 years in the league, won championships alongside Michael Jordan and Tim Duncan, soaked up lessons from Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich, flexed his expertise as a TV analyst for TNT and general manager for the Phoenix Suns. What he hadn’t done, before 2014, was spend even one minute on an NBA coaching staff, in any capacity.
“I had to figure out what [my] weaknesses were,” Kerr says. “Because until you coach, you might not really [know].”
That entire 2014-15 season was a learning process for the Golden State Warriors’ rookie coach—one that happily and unexpectedly ended with a championship, thanks to the otherworldly talents of Curry and Co. executing Kerr’s offensive vision. But success, even modest success, was hardly assured. Kerr couldn’t know what he didn’t know about coaching until he actually, you know, coached.
Tonight, JJ Redick begins a similar journey in Los Angeles, one in which he will try to guide LeBron James and the Lakers back to relevance without having logged a single minute as a coach at any level beyond a fourth-grade boys team.
Like Kerr, Redick had a long and successful career as a role player. Like Kerr, Redick spent some time as a broadcaster before diving into coaching. Like Kerr, Redick has the privilege of coaching a generational star (albeit one who’s about to turn 40). Like Kerr, Redick will be learning as he goes—but doing so with the most scrutinized, hyper-analyzed, drama-prone team in the league.
“I have never coached in the NBA before,” Redick quipped at his introductory press conference in June. “I don’t know if you guys have heard that.”
Does a lack of experience matter? Of course. Well, probably. Maybe. It all depends—on the coach himself, his personality, his adaptability, and his acumen; on the talent he inherits and the staff he hires; on the expectations of the franchise; and on a zillion other factors that are unique to every situation.
We’ve seen former players with zero experience succeed as head coaches. We’ve seen longtime assistants with impeccable credentials fail. We’ve seen mixed results from college coaches, minor league coaches, international imports, and every other category.
“I don’t think there’s one way to go about it,” says Stan Van Gundy, who spent 20 years coaching in college and the NBA before getting his first head coaching job with the Miami Heat in 2003.
Sixteen former NBA players have skipped directly to head coach without any prior experience—11 in the last 30 seasons—with varying results. Larry Bird’s three-year run with Indiana included a Finals appearance. Derek Fisher flopped in New York and hasn’t coached in the NBA since. Doc Rivers won Coach of the Year in his first season with Orlando, and later took Boston to the title. Jason Kidd stumbled in Brooklyn, but just coached Dallas to the Finals.
Survey a dozen NBA coaches and you’ll get largely the same bromides: Experience is great and valuable, but not an absolute necessity; expertise, judgment, and people skills matter as much—or more—than time spent in the film room or the practice court; relative “success” or “failure” for a first-timer depends much more on the roster and other factors than it does on the coach’s résumé.
“There’s all kinds of paths that you can take,” says Alvin Gentry, who has worked as both a head coach and an assistant in the league since the late 1980s.
But, well, coaching experience (and NBA experience, specifically) does matter. It’s evident in who the teams hire. Consider:
- Twenty-five of the NBA’s 30 head coaches this season previously worked as NBA assistants, although many also had college, G League, or international experience.
- One current coach, Chicago’s Billy Donovan, got his first NBA head-coaching post (with Oklahoma City) by coming directly from the college ranks in 2015.
- The remaining four are former NBA players who got their first head-coaching job with no prior experience: Redick, Kerr, Rivers (Orlando in 1999), and Kidd (Brooklyn in 2013). Rivers is now with Milwaukee, his fifth head-coaching gig, while Kidd is now with Dallas, his third.
“All 30 head coaches in this league got a good grasp of the game,” says Gentry, who is now working in the Sacramento Kings’ front office. “I think the difference-makers are the guys that can manage people.”
But those 25 former assistants do have some distinct advantages because of all they had to learn on the way up. NBA assistant coaches spend countless hours dissecting game film, both of their own team and of opponents. They work directly with players on a daily basis, sometimes leading on-court skill development, sometimes reviewing schemes and film. They might run an occasional practice or shootaround, or develop the game plan. They’ve been in hundreds (or thousands) of timeout huddles, discussing inbounds plays and rotation decisions while under the duress of real games with real consequences.
“A guy like JJ is going to come in, and he’s going to have to have the ability to study, prepare, and make the final decisions without ever having really done any of that other stuff,” says a veteran NBA assistant. “You’re the sum of your experiences; you never had any of those experiences. That’s going to be tough.”
As an assistant coach, Van Gundy says, “you get an idea of how to structure training camp and practices, how you manage an 82-game schedule, back-to-back games and days off and walk-throughs. You’re thinking about the game exactly the way a head coach is. You’re involved in every decision.”
Coaches across the league all praise Redick for his basketball IQ—a quality that came through vividly in his years as a TV analyst and podcaster, particularly in the Mind the Game series that Redick cohosted with James, in which they broke down plays in granular detail. But it’s one thing to understand the game, and another to teach it and manage it. Learning how to convey all that knowledge effectively and efficiently can take time.
“You certainly process things differently as a coach than you do as a player,” says Van Gundy, who coached Redick for five years in Orlando. “There’s no question he knows the game of basketball, and he’s really, really smart. … But what coaching comes down to is: It’s not what you know, it’s what you can get guys to do on the floor.”
As a variety of coaches described it, the job is largely about leadership and communication: Can you articulate a clear vision, a sound game plan? Can you get your players to believe in that vision and execute it? Will you hold yourself accountable when things go awry? And then there’s the basic mechanics of the job, from drawing up plays to making rotation decisions on the fly. A longtime assistant will have experienced—and contributed—in all of these areas.
“There’s so much more than the game, and if you haven’t had experience navigating that, I think that’d be really hard,” says Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson, who spent years under Rick Adelman, Mike D’Antoni, and Mike Budenholzer before getting his first top job in Brooklyn in 2016. He spent the last three seasons working as an assistant for Kerr, following a stint under Tyronn Lue with the L.A. Clippers.
Like other coaches, Atkinson says experience is not an absolute prerequisite, although—as someone who played only overseas—“I would have had no chance in hell without those experiences” as an assistant coach. “Being with the coaches I’ve been with was so invaluable.”
Brian Keefe, a career assistant who’s beginning his first season as head coach of the Washington Wizards, also credits his varied roles (from film room to player development to scouting—“a little bit of everything”) with preparing him for this moment and helping him understand how every job functions. But he’s quick to add, “That was just my path. It doesn’t make someone else’s path any better [or worse]. You’re all just unique.”
Redick might be more dependent on his staff than a more experienced coach would be, says a veteran assistant. As several coaches also noted, everything in a game happens much faster than people realize—until they’ve done it themselves.
“There’s three seconds to go, you’re down one, side out-of-bounds,” Van Gundy says. “What are you running? You have to make that decision.”
The Lakers clearly sought to address Redick’s inexperience by hiring two former head coaches—Scott Brooks and Nate McMillan—as assistants.
“Hiring the right staff is invaluable,” says Chris Finch, who spent a decade as an assistant before the Minnesota Timberwolves named him head coach in 2021. “You have to have guys who can fill in where you’re weak. Knowing where you have weak spots, having the awareness or where you might need help, that’s big. You [want] guys that are gonna obviously preach the same philosophy that you have, but yet still bring you different ideas. That’s a tough balance.”
As a rookie head coach, Kerr leaned on a seasoned staff anchored by Gentry, who has been a head coach four times (not counting interim stints), and Ron Adams, one of the NBA’s most respected veteran assistants and someone who has worked for everyone from Jerry Tarkanian to George Karl to Tom Thibodeau to Brad Stevens.
“I learned a ton about defense from Ron Adams,” Kerr says. “The way to teach shell drills and basic defensive concepts, I just watched Ron. And Alvin Gentry really helped me on the offensive side.”
Still, it took time for Kerr to figure out the right pacing for his practice schedule to get as much done as possible without losing his players’ focus and enthusiasm. “I was much more likely to have a disjointed practice that first year; it didn’t flow very well. And then you realize: Oh, wait, it really matters. Like, do the slower drills first, and build up into the faster drills, end on a high. Don’t have it be choppy, where you’re doing a standstill drill and then you’re doing something live and then you’re standing around again. Players get bored with that.”’
In truth, coaching is only a fraction of the modern head coach’s job. He’s also the conduit to every sector of the modern franchise—from the sports science and medical staffs to the analytics group to the marketing department, the front office, and (of course) the owner. A head coach has to manage up, down, and diagonally. He sets the team’s travel schedule and even decides who’s allowed on the team plane. He might be asked to attend season-ticket holder events. And he’s required to speak to the media nearly every day—sometimes multiple times a day. After the team’s star player (if it has one), the head coach is the face of the franchise, as well as its primary spokesman. Indeed, these days much of the actual coaching is delegated to the staff.
As Kerr puts it, the head coach’s role “is more CEO than it’s ever been.” And because of that, Kerr says, “I would take emotional intelligence over X’s and O’s” in a head coach. “I’m looking for the ability to relate to people,” he says, “because, especially these days, you’re managing so many people.”
Also noteworthy: Coaches work far longer hours than players do—a fact that’s often a shock to the system when retired players first make the transition to assistant or head coaches.
“Here’s one way I always describe this,” says Finch. “When you’re an assistant coach, you can go out to dinner with your wife, and you can enjoy that dinner. You can be present. You can be listening to whatever she has to say, and you can respond. When you’re a head coach, zero chance that happens. Your mind is somewhere else. Your phone’s gonna blow up. You’re distracted. You got a million things. It’s very hard to be present and detached.”
Redick brings some clear assets to the job. He has both the basketball acumen and the communication skills to convey it. He has an established rapport with James. And—like Kerr, Rivers, and Jackson—Redick got to spend a couple of years soaking up lessons from veteran coaches during pregame sessions as a national broadcaster. Kerr and others also say it’s valuable to put some distance between a playing career and coaching.
There’s no telling how Redick will fare, this season or beyond. He’s taking over a Lakers team that finished eighth in the West (47 wins) and lost in the first round of the playoffs, with an aging star (James) and an oft-injured costar (Anthony Davis). Most projection models have the Lakers hovering around .500.
But Redick, like Kerr and many others who have made a direct leap from player to head coach, at least gets the benefit of a functional roster built around two All-Stars. Contrast that with this season’s other rookie head coaches, all of whom came up the assistant route: Brian Keefe (Washington), Jordi Fernández (Brooklyn), and Charles Lee (Charlotte) all took over lottery teams and are virtually guaranteed to start their careers with losing records.
Indeed, over the last 30 seasons, first-time head coaches with no experience (like Kerr, Kidd, and Rivers) have compiled a better first-year winning percentage (.519) than “experienced” first-time coaches (.441), according to an analysis by The Ringer’s Zach Kram. That’s because the ex-player with no experience often gets a better roster than his experienced peers.
Experienced Coaches Vs. Inexperienced Coaches
Of 111 coaches in Kram’s analysis, just 12 won at least two-thirds of their games in year one. Three came from the no-experience group (Kerr, Larry Bird, and Steve Nash)—a disproportionate figure, given that the “no experience” category made up just 9 percent of all first-time coaches in the study.
(It’s notable, too, that while teams clearly value experience when choosing a head coach, they’re still more inclined to hire a former NBA player with zero experience than a woman with an extensive coaching résumé, despite a wealth of candidates.)
Two franchises have hired back-to-back candidates from the no-experience group: the Indiana Pacers, who went with Isiah Thomas after Larry Bird; and the Warriors, who went from the lottery to the playoffs during Mark Jackson’s three-year run before Kerr took over.
Kerr’s case is particularly vivid—he had the luxury of turning down an offer to coach the (then-dysfunctional) New York Knicks to take the Warriors job. It was obviously the right call—and not just because the Warriors had superior talent. “I might not have been a good choice taking over a lottery team with a bunch of young guys,” Kerr says, “because I wasn’t good enough with the details at that point. But I think I was the right choice [for the Warriors], which was validated by winning the championship, obviously. I was the right choice for that team.”
Redick isn’t inheriting a contender (“I think the play-in is their ceiling,” says Van Gundy), but he does get to coach two future Hall of Famers with one of the premier sports franchises in one of the most attractive markets.
It’s no surprise, then, that career coaches sometimes grumble when an ex-player gets to “skip the line” to the head coach’s seat, and often with the advantage of better rosters. “The longtime assistant coaches resoundingly resent someone like that getting the position,” said one industry source. “Because they’ve put in the time and they’ve worked their tails off to establish themselves over the years. And then a former player ends up getting an opportunity without any coaching experience. It’s frustrating.” (Those feelings are not universal, however. As one veteran said, “We all recognize that’s part of the landscape.” Said another: “My general reaction is, Who cares? Good luck!”)
Redick may have an even greater burden to bear among the coaching community, because (to his credit as a commentator) he was often quite blunt with his criticism during his years as a podcaster and ESPN analyst. He was also chosen over several seasoned NBA coaches, including James Borrego, Sam Cassell, Micah Nori, and David Adelman. There will surely be some quiet schadenfreude across the league if he stumbles. (Also, he’s JJ Redick: He’s been irritating fans since his days at Duke, where, in his own words, he was “sort of a prick.” Also, yeah. Duke.)
And there will almost certainly be some stumbles. It took Kerr time to streamline those ambitious practice plans back in 2014, time to learn the rhythms and quirks of the schedule, and time to learn his own weaknesses. And he had the benefit of taking over a 50-win team, powered by a generational talent in his prime.
“When you’re winning, everything is easier,” Kerr says. “If we didn’t have all that talent and we were losing games, my experience would have been changed dramatically. So I was definitely one of the lucky ones.”
How will Redick ultimately fare this season and beyond? Will his coaching career more closely mirror that of Kerr or that of Steve Nash, who lasted just two-plus seasons in Brooklyn and hasn’t coached since? Will the lack of experience matter?
“There’s no preparation for being a head coach, in my opinion, other than being a head coach,” says Van Gundy. “There’s always growing pains. I don’t care what your previous position was—until you’re a head coach, you’re not ready. He’ll get ready. And it’ll take him some time.”
