I posted this a while ago, but I thought I'd revise it based on the extension + our WCF flameout:
I feel you should judge NBA coaches based on:
1. Team performance relative to talent: How did we do vs how did everybody think we'd do.
Nobody thought we'd make the WCF. There was only one playoff series in his entire tenure where we were favored to win and we didn't, and even in that season many were expecting us to not even make the playoffs.
GRADE: A
2. Player performance before/after they leave our team: Does a player improve when put on a different roster and unencumbered by our coach?
How do Plumlee, Crabbe, Aldridge, Matthews, Batum, etc look? The only guy I can think of who got significantly better was Pat Connaughton. Is that because Stotts held him back, or Giannis just creates a shitton of wide open threes? Portland has an outstanding track record on reclamation projects as well (Kanter, Hood and Curry most recently). If I'm an NBA agent and my player's stock is currently low, the Blazers are the top destination on my list. Nobody turns lemons into lemonade like Terry Stotts.
GRADE: A+
3. Coach's ability to reach players: Do players bitch a lot or fight with the coach? Is the locker characterized by chemistry and people accepting roles?
Widely regarded as one of the best lockers in the league. Portland is loaded with guys who were overlooked/underappreciated. We don't have a single player who is doing worse than expected from when they first joined the team. Nurkic was viewed as a locker room cancer in Denver. Now a lot of that may be Dame and CJ, but good coaches get their stars to be on their page and it's clearly happening here.
GRADE: B+
4. Team ability to play a "modern" game: The NBA constantly evolves. Does our team reflect current best practices?
We run a guard-oriented pace-and-space team that's pretty much what everybody is trying to do, so our offense is fine. Our defense is predictable, low gambling and relies to much on dropping bigs too much.
GRADE: B-
5. Team organization in-game: Do we take advantage of 2-for-1s? Do we run out of fouls frequently? Do players play too much/not enough? Do we make adjustments?
Some of this is pretty subjective. I hate how much we play Turner, for example, but on the other hand maybe the coach sees things on the court or in the locker room that I don't. But overall on the objective stuff (timeouts, out-of-bound play effectiveness, 2-for-1's) Portland is actually really, really good. We definitely should have been better prepared for Warriors small-ball though, and it's clear he's slow to change things up when it's going badly.
GRADE: B
6. If we fired the coach today, who replaces him? This is a grade for how irreplaceable this coach is vs what's out there.
When you look at his body of work and my criteria, it's really hard to argue we'd be better with most other coaches that are available. Portland just isn't a destination franchise. We don't have the talent, the glamor or the history. We spent a decade in coaching hell with Cheeks & McMillan. Run them through my criteria and it's pretty obvious how good we have it now.
GRAD: A
Stotts isn't a top 5 coach. If we could get one of them, hey, I'm all for it. (If we can give up CJ and get back Giannis, well, sign me up for that too.) But realistically the Blazers aren't going to be a magnet for that kind of coaching talent. We've got about as good as we're likely to get. I'd rather the team focus on roster improvement and developing youngsters, and leave a system that mostly works in place.
