I'm gonna say that in the list of All-Time Greatest Coaches, he is in my top 3, right behind Red Auerbach and the Zen Master.

Where would you put him, Ags?

I think I might even put Pop ahead of Phil Jackson. The consistency the Spurs have had over the past 15 years is amazing. The execution of his system is amazing. People always seem to be in the right spot on both sides of the floor. They might not always have the best athletes on the floor, but without exception the Spurs are always the smartest team and that's a direct reflection of Pop.

There's no way you can put Pop ahead of Phil, and I am a Spurs fan.

This year has done a lot for his all-time status.

How many coaches can institute a completely new philosophy and assimilate half a dozen new players without missing a beat on winning percentage? He has created a powerful culture in that organization.

I think you have to take a look at the teams each coach had.

Phil Jackson never went to Charlotte or Indiana or New Orleans. He went from Michael Jordan to Kobe/Shaq and continued with Kobe. Those are 3 of the top players to ever play basketball. I'm not saying he wasn't a great coach and his number of championships may never be matched by another coach but Pop hasn't had teams like Jackson did.

Tim is great but he's not Kobe or MJ.

Tim > Kobe as far as franchise players go. Without Shaq, Kobe would be sitting at 2 rings right now. Not talking star power or offensive ability. Overall impact on a franchise, Timmy wins.

With that being said Pop is definitely near the top of the coaching ranks. Phil Jackson was still amazing. He made his teams play at their highest level, as a team, to win championships, which is what great coaches do.

quote:

---

There's no way you can put Pop ahead of Phil, and I am a Spurs fan.

---

It's a debate, especially given that Pop has had MUCH less talent to work with over his career compared to Jackson.

There's no question which coach is the better developer of talent, and that's Pop.

Phil has 3-peated 3 times, and has a back-to-back on top of that (he also has 2 as a player). 11 as a coach, 13 total. Pop cannot touch it. I dont think there is any debate there.

Duncan is a top 10 all time player. Robinson is very close to that.

MJ is the GOAT. Kobe and Shaq are Top 10 all time players.


Would any of them have reached that level of greatness without those coaches? That's more debatable than which of the two coaches ranks higher. Clearly, it is Phil.

Lebron is going to be a top 5 all-time player. He has been in the league for nearly a decade and nobody has won one with him yet.

Paul Silas (terrible)
Mike Brown (terrible)
Erik Spoelstra (not as bad as the other two, but pretty damn bad)

Phil is better than Poppovich, I don't thank anyone other than a koolaid chugging spurs fan would try to argue otherwise. The reality is that most coaches are not as fortunate as Poppovich has been the past 15 years of having a superstar centerpiece who is also completely team-first, unselfish, and doesn't care about numbers (Tim Duncan). Duncan is the enabler and what allows Poppovich to do what he does. Duncan has superstar talent plus the unselfishness and coachability of the 12th man at the end of the bench, which is very rare. So people can say all they want about Phil havng great talent, but so has Poppovich, and you could easily make the argument that coaching and channeling Duncan into a team-first framework these past 15 years was a much easier job than channeling and corraling into a team-first framework such forceful and dominant ego-centric personalities such as young late 80's Jordan, post-retirement MJ, 2 alpha dogs in their prime in Shaq/Kobe, and finally the older, me-first, ball-hog-I-wanna-be-better-than-Jordan Kobe Bryant. Let's not play it down to make Poppovich look better, the reality is that like all mutiple-championship coaches, he got dealt an oustanding hand.

I'd probably go Jackson, Pop, Auerbach.

Love Red but he essentially put together a great team filled with HoF'ers and never had to worry about FA while he played in an NBA that was a fraction of the size of the current one. Great coach but he rarely had to make adjustments, the Celts rarely had more than 1 or 2 teams to play against that were close to their level when they rolled up all those Titles.

Jackson did have great talent but he also won it too many times in different places with different pieces. Personally I hated him in Chicago and LA (mainly for garbage like the "asterick" and his constant working of the officials) but can recognize he was the best.

Pop has put 116 players around Tim Duncan over this span of consistent greatness to keep the Spurs in the hunt for the title basically every year. The styles have evolved and the strategies of resting players to go with the tactics of drawing up and executing plays are truly masterful. The Spurs have consistently been right at the top of most disciplined teams in the NBA year after year and mistakes have always been a rarity.

I guess I would put Pat Riley at 4. Honestly I think he did a better job winning with Miami than he did with all the Titles in LA. It didn't take a coaching genius to win with Magic, Kareem, Worthy, and a strong supporting cast.

The fact that every coach walks into a different situation makes me shy away from rigid numbers. I like "he's a top 3" or "top 5" more. Phil had the luxury of coaching into flashy, big market cities, which meant he never had to work as hard at scouting talent. He always had a surplus of free agents beating on his door. Pop has always to find hidden gems and groom them into stars. Heck, he's turned a kid who was cut by the Cavs into a legit playoff contributor who can be a goto guy in clutch time.

Another point: I truly believe that if you'd removed Phil from the staff from 96-98 and let the assistants handle coaching (appoint a different one as HC every year), the Bulls still would have won at least 1, probably 2, and possibly 3, championships. That was about the sickest collection of talent every assembled on a team.

That said, if you put a gun to my head and made me pick one, it'd be Phil. Good fortune or not, he's won 11 championships. If Pop wins another 2, I think he'll have done enough to get into the "best ever?" conversation because he'll have won all 6 in a place where it's more difficult to win.

I think Phil and Red are 1-2.

If Pop wins this year, I think he and Riley are 3a and 3b.

Definitely an all time great.

I don't know if this is a Pop praise or general praise of the Spurs organization & culture, but as much credit as the Spurs coaching staff gets for X's & O's, they deserve for identifying and selecting the right talent, but also for developing it. They are so good that it has made me wonder that if other draft picks that went to lesser franchise had gone to the Spurs, would they have developed?

Additionally, NBA coaching is also about managing egos, and both Pop and Phil have done that well.

Phil Jackson walked into situations where he always had the most talented team in the NBA. I don't know how you can argue otherwise. He is still a great coach, because other coaches did not win even with that talent, but come on. He had:

Jordan/Pippen
Shaq/Kobe
Kobe/Gasol

I think that if you put Popovich as the coach on those teams, the result is the same. If you put Phil Jackson on the Spurs for the past 15 years I'm not sure the Spurs win as many games as they do under Pop.

Other than championships, which coach has developed or had more disciples from his system go on to be successful at other programs? Is that also a measure of a great coach?

If we're doing that, Vinny Del Negro and Mike Brown drag Pop out of the top 10.

These comparisons are always idiotic, regardless of how you rank them. The only way for a true comparison is to give them both the exact same circumstances to coach with, which is not possible.

Why do people need to rank them? Just leave it at, Pop and Phil are two of the best coaches in any sport in all of history. Period.

blynch,

Phil is the superior NBA coach. You are underestimating the difficulty of bringing highly-paid NBA superstars together and getting them to perform as a team. I don't think anyone other than Phil (including Popovich)could have coaxed 3 championships and 4 finals trips in 5 years from the Shaq/Kobe duo and drama fest. Those two did everything they could to rip the team apart, and it finally happened in 2004 with Kobe sabotaging the finals series against the pistons. Those guys were constantly at each other's throats fighting to be the alpha dog from the day Kobe showed up. Popovich never has had a centerpiece of his team as difficult to manage as Shaq was (Duncan is infinitely easier to work with compared to Shaq) and never on top of that had to coach and corral a player as good but also forceful/egotistical as Kobe and integrate him and get him to play nice alongside Duncan. Robinson, Ginobili, and Parker were and are perfectly happy allowing duncan be the main guy, while Duncan himself is all about the team and could care less whether he is the alpha dog, making popovich's job monumentally easier. Switch Popovich with Jackson over the past 15 years and I actually think the Spurs would have 8-9 titles, because Duncan and all those spurs players running the triangle offense would have been dynamite, plus Popovich would not have been able to deal with Shaq/Kobe and make his system work, he would have traded one of them rather than try to get them to co-exist, just like when in '96 he traded dennis rodman for will perdue and a bag of peanuts, and lended the bulls a nice helping hand towards securing their 2nd three-peat.

[This message has been edited by cdhaggie07 (edited 5/21/2012 2:31p).]