N.B.A. Coaches Find There’s No Time to Lose

N.B.A. coaches are quickly finding out that the only job security they hold is when they actually hold a job. Reggie Theus followed a rapidly growing line on Monday when he was fired by the Sacramento Kings.
Theus is the sixth coach to be fired this season, which is in only its second month. The 76ers fired Maurice Cheeks last Saturday, and P. J. Carlesimo of the Oklahoma City Thunder, Eddie Jordan of the Washington Wizards, Sam Mitchell of the Toronto Raptors and Randy Wittman of the Minnesota Timberwolves had already been let go.
Lonnie Cooper and his Atlanta-based Career Sports and Entertainment represent all six of the fired coaches. They also represent Celtics Coach Doc Rivers, Portland Trail Blazers Coach Nate McMillan and Kenny Natt, the Kings assistant who ascended to Theus’s job on an interim basis.
The dismissals account for 20 percent of all N.B.A. coaches; last off-season, eight organizations changed coaches.
In the N.B.A., as the Celtics, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Los Angeles Lakers distance themselves from the rest of the league, owners and general managers are not sitting back and hoping to catch up. Instead, they are looking to inject their teams with new leadership, an easier tactic than shifting rosters of multimillion-dollar athletes.
“It just shows you the lack of patience with coaches,” said Jeff Van Gundy, a former coach of the Knicks and the Houston Rockets and now an ESPN analyst. “We have great patience with players, we have great patience with G.M.’s and we have great patience with owners, but we have next to none for coaches.”
Clearly, all the firings were the results of teams off to disappointing starts; the fired coaches were a combined 29-78 this season. Still, the dismissals of Jordan and Mitchell particularly rankled some around the league. Jordan guided the Wizards to the playoffs the previous three years and their first postseason series win since 1982. The league tabbed Mitchell as the coach of the year for the 2006-7 season after the Raptors tied a franchise record by winning 47 games.
“No coach is perfect,” Van Gundy said. “The question you have to ask yourself is if, in a year from now, are you better off coaching now than a year ago? Stability wins. You get a guy that you believe in and you ride him through that, from the good to the bad.”
To a degree, even the firing of Theus appeared disconcerting to some. In 2007-8, his first season as an N.B.A. coach, Theus led a ragtag Kings group to 39 wins, perhaps establishing unrealistic expectations this season after the Kings traded Ron Artest to Houston.
Among the league’s anomalies in longevity is Utah’s stalwart coach, Jerry Sloan. The N.B.A. has had 225 coaching changes since Sloan took the Jazz’s helm in December 1988.
“It’s always intriguing to me that everyone preaches we’re all in this together, we’re a family,” Van Gundy said. “The difference is we are in this together only when it’s going good.
“In some of these organizations, it’s about rapid-fire change of coaches, and the thing is, it just doesn’t work. The teams that are constantly in upheaval rarely are the successful ones.”
Now, Van Gundy said, “It’s championship or bust.”