Kevin McHale: NBA Coach Of The Year?
Disclaimer: This post was written on 4 April, all stats are up to date as of writing, not necessarily publishing.
Kevin McHale is the Coach of the Year. If you follow me to the end of the article, you’ll see why. If you’re already typing a comment, no one is ever going to make sense to you. Strap in.
James Harden has emerged as one of the best players in the NBA. If you want to debate, you can argue he is the best player in the NBA. He’s amidst an MVP campaign the likes of which haven’t been seen since Lebron James and Kevin Durant were neck and neck (2013-2014). The last transcendent player to reach Harden’s (and Curry’s) level was Lebron James. Out of that season Mo Williams saw an NBA All star game and Mike Brown saw coach of the year. Williams and Brown reaped the rewards of playing next to an amazing basketball player. Why then shouldn’t McHale be given the same treatment?
Case closed, right? It’s worked historically, so it has to work again. OK, so I have to reinforce this case.
McHale is sitting on his second 50+ win season in as many years, his 4th straight season above .500, and his second straight season at 65% win percentage or better. Throughout this season in particular, McHale has juggled numerous starting lineups, hasn’t had his complementary star (Dwight Howard) for more than half of the season, and integrated both Corey Brewer and Josh Smith as major contributors in short order. Now, since the coach of the year award is not a lifetime achievement award (If it were, Greg Popovich should receive it for the last 10 years), we should look at Kevin’s competition.
To keep everything in perspective, Houston players have racked up 368 total games missed this year, 166 of which are did not play qualifiers (DNP). Golden State has suffered 261 games missed with 136 DNP’s. Out of all of the teams broadly considered to be contenders when the season began, only Oklahoma City comes close to Houston’s woes with 336 games missed to injury at 157 DNP’s. You have to go as deep as Portland, at 16th, with 292 games missed and 162 DNP’s, to find a single team in the Western Conference playoff hunt.
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Worse yet, when you adjust rankings to the impact of the missing players, Houston ranks 7th most harmed in the NBA due to their injury woes. Miami is the only non-lottery team above Houston in this metric and Golden State shows up at 27th Despite these injuries that slant hard against Houston’s prolonged success, Houston is 2nd place in the toughest conference in basketball and in 1st place in the most competitive division in the NBA.
Let’s look past the lack of resources that McHale has worked with, he has an MVP caliber talent. For comparison’s sake, let’s look at the odd’s on favorite coach of the year, Steve Kerr, and his team. Let’s remove MVP candidates from each team. Let’s set the metric that a player has to have at least played 41 games for the team in order to qualify. We’ll go 8 deep so we get playoff numbers, as well. If we parse this, we can see who is working with the better roster, disregard the healthier roster for now:
| Golden State | Houston Rockets | ||
| Player | Pts./Reb./Ass.t/ Stl-Blk. | Player | Pts./Reb./Asst./Stl.-Blk. |
| Klay Thompson | 21/3/3/1 | Trevor Ariza | 13/6/3/2 |
| Draymond Green | 12/7/4/2 | Patrick Beverley* | 10/4/3/1 |
| Harrison Barnes | 10/6/1/1 | Donatas Motiejunas | 12/6/2/1 |
| Andre Iguodala | 8/3/3/1 | Corey Brewer | 12/4/2/1 |
| Andrew Bogut | 6/8/3/2 | Josh Smith | 12/6/2/1 |
| David Lee | 8/6/2/1 | Kostas Papanikolaou | 4/3/2/1 |
| Shaun Livingston | 6/2/3/1 | Joey Dorsey | 3/4/.5/1 |
| Marreese Speights | 11/4/1/.5 | ||
| Leandro Barbosa | 7/1/1/1 | ||
| Totals: | 89/40/21/10.5 | Totals: | 66/33/14.5/8 |
*Inclusion of Beverley is fairly generous considering his injury and inability this season.
What we’re looking at in this chart is simple. If you strip Kerr of his all-star, you have a healthy roster averaging nearly 90 points a game with roughly 11 stops per game. Houston has had one game without Harden and players who didn’t qualify for this review of “long-term” success contributed to that win, however, as it stands, the Rockets would put up 23 less points, 7 less rebounds, and fail to control the game as well as the Warriors.
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When you look to the supporting crew of these teams, even extending generosity to lessen McHale’s claim to Coach of the Year, it’s difficult to argue against McHale’s qualifications. Kerr certainly has the more talented roster playing at a better level. This, however, would make a stronger case for McHale’s taking the award considering the Rockets are 2nd in the West, albeit by 10 games. However, looking at the numbers, wouldn’t you expect that gap and the health disparity to be much worse than 10 games?
Simply put, McHale for Coach of the Year, nobody else has had to work nearly as hard as he has for it.