[Historical and Non-Current] User Guide for Real Coach Ratings, May 2010

IMPORTANT NOTICE: THIS IS A NON CURRENT, LEGACY USER GUIDE THAT WILL EVENTUALLY BE DELETED. AN UPDATED AND CURRENT GUIDE IS LOCATED HERE.




INTRODUCTION
I am proud and pleased to present what is probably the world's first serious effort to accurately rate and rank all of the current NBA head coaches. The first edition of these annual ratings was published in October 2008. The second edition was published (slightly late) in early December, 2009.

Why should the coaches hide behind a black curtain? Concerning coaches, there is virtually a total lack of the kind of statistical comparing and contrasting that goes on with players 24/7. I for one think it is way overdue that coaches be fairly and systematically compared and contrasted.

I can pretty much guarantee you that no one has ever, even with the capabilities created by the Internet age, put in as much effort and thought as I have into fairly comparing NBA coaches with widely different lengths of time spent in professional head coaching. And this system CAN be used in other Leagues, other countries, and on other planets. If there are any other basketball planets, that is!

For convenience, this Guide is developed into main sections and subsections. The main sections are:

--Mechanics of Basic Real Coach Ratings
--Usage of Basic Real Coach Ratings
--Mechanics of Advanced Coach Ratings
--Usage of Advanced Coach Ratings
--Cautions Regarding Basic and Advanced Real Coach Ratings

Within each section subsections are in caps as shown.

======== MECHANICS OF BASIC REAL COACH RATINGS =========

POSITIVE FACTORS THAT AFFECT REAL COACH RATINGS
1. Number of Regular Season Games Coached: The Experience Factor:
One Point is given for each regular season game coached up to 600 games, which is almost 7 1/2 seasons worth of games. If a Coach has not learned just about everything he needs to by this point, he most likely never will, so the award for experience is sharply reduced for all games coached beyond 600. 0.25 points (1/4 of a point) is given for games 601 through 1,000. Nothing at all is given for any games coached beyond 1,000 games. If a coach has not learned everything he can learn after 1,000 games, he is never going to learn it.

What about rookie and near rookie coaches? Just because they have never coached in the NBA, should their experience rating be zero? No, I don't believe so. They either have substantial coaching experience in other Leagues, or they were extremely talented and/or intelligent players, or both, or else they would not have been hired to be a head Coach in the NBA. So any coach who has coached for fewer than 200 NBA games is given exactly 200 points for experience. So rookie coaches start out with Real Coach Ratings of 200 and they go up or down from there.

2. Number of Playoff Season Games Coached: the Playoff Experience Factor:
Four points are awarded for every playoff game coached (regardless of result). The limit is going to be 300 such games. Probably no one will ever reach the limit except for Phil Jackson. He exactly reached 300 playoff games coached after he won his 10th Ring in June 2009. So Jackson will fail to get any more playoff experience points when he coaches more playoff games in 2010. Certainly by June of 2009, Phil Jackson already knew as much as he will ever know about winning NBA playoff games.

3. Number of Games Coached With Current Team:
This is a supplementary experience score which most benefits coaches who have gone the longest without being fired by their current teams. The points given are 0.25 (1/4 of a point) for all games coached with the team the Coach is currently working for.

The one side of the coin regarding this is that the coach must be doing what the organization wants to avoid being fired, and he can't be a total failure basketball wise, so starting with those things he deserves credit in proportion to how long he has kept his post. The other side of the coin is that the more experience a Coach has with a particular team, the more valuable he is to that franchise, because he knows everybody and everything concerned with the franchise better and better with each passing year. Generally speaking, the more successive games a Coach has coached with the same team, the more effectively and efficiently he can help the team squeeze out wins that would otherwise be losses.

Jerry Sloan, who coming in to 2009-10 had coached a mind boggling 1,668 games for the Utah Jazz, is the ultimate example of a Coach who due to his many years with the same team is going to be more effective and efficient than he would be if he had just switched to a different team. Due partly to this factor, do not be surprised if the Jazz become a losing team shortly after Sloan finally retires.

Another name for this factor might be "franchise specific experience." For 2009-10 the Washington Wizards hired a new head Coach, Flip Saunders, who has a lot of prior experience with other teams and has a relatively high rating. But he is brand new to the Wizards, so be careful not to expect miracles or even to assume that his coaching is going to be as good as it has been in the past from the get go. Look instead for the Wizards to get a little better as the season goes along and in the coming years if Saunders remains the coach. Because Saunders needs time to merge his skills and abilities with the specific factors involved with making the Wizards a winning team.

4. Regular Season Wins
4 points is assigned per regular season win.

5. Playoff Wins:
20 points are assigned per playoff win. Very slightly more than half the teams make the playoffs in the current NBA: 16 out of 30 teams. Theoretically, unless he is stuck with a truly lousy roster, any good coach can win a lot of regular season games and get his team into the playoffs. Plus, any coach at all, including a bad one, can squeak a very good or great team into the playoffs. For a good coach, merely getting into the playoffs is really not much of an accomplishment at all.

Many, many owners, managers, and fans do not seem to understand this, but the only thing that really matters with regard to coaching is what happens in the playoffs. Only the truly good coaches can win in the playoffs. The playoffs are where the wheat is separated from the chaff. In the NBA, the regular season is quite honestly nothing more than the preseason for the "playoff season," which is the the season which really matters when all is said and done.

Playoff games are generally more intense in all respects: individual players' efforts, team play as a whole, and coaching efforts are all ramped up.

For all of these reasons, it is necessary to factor playoff games as being worth five times as much as regular season games. So for both for wins and losses, playoff games count five times as much as regular season games do.

6. Championships
30 points are added for each winning Championship appearance. (That is 30 points regardless of how many games the Championship consisted of.) Since Championships average about 6 games, this is roughly equivalent to adding five experience points for each Championship game coached in the winning effort. Counting the four points every coach gets for experience for every playoff game, the total experience points for each Championship game (where the Championship is won) is approximately nine.

12 points are added for each Championship appearance where the Coach lost in the Championship. (That is 12 points regardless of how many games the Championship consisted of.) Counting the four points every coach gets for experience for every playoff game, the total experience points for each Championship game (losing effort) is approximately six.

NEGATIVE FACTORS THAT AFFECT REAL COACH RATINGS
1. Regular Season Losses:
5.75 points is charged for each regular season loss.

2. Playoff Losses:
28.75 points is charged for each playoff loss.

Now there will be some who leap out of their seats and say "this guy is off his rocker" when they see that the penalty for losing a playoff game is 28.75 points while the award for winning a regular season game is four points. I can assure you, ye of little faith, that I know exactly what I am doing and that this is either precisely correct or possibly the playoff loss penalty should be even greater. I have already explained why playoff games must be valued at least five times the valuation put on regular season games. A regular season loss is 5.75 points, and 5.75 times 5 is 28.75.

Now consider the true underlying net positive and negative scores for the four types of games and results, which you get by combining the experience award and the winning or losing number:

TRUE NET SCORES COMBINING EXPERIENCE AND WIN / LOSS SCORES TOGETHER
Regular Season Win True Net Score: 5 Points: 4 points for the win and 1 point for the experience. But it is 4.25 points for coaches (for new games) who have between 600 and 1,000 games coached since they get only .25 points for experience. And it is just 4 points for coaches (for new games) with more than 1,000 games coached since they don't get any further points for experience.

Regular Season Loss True Net Score: Minus 4.75 Points: minus 5.75 points for the loss plus 1 point for the experience. But it is minus 5.5 points (for new games) for coaches who have between 600 and 1,000 games coached since they get only .25 point for experience. And it is minus 5.75 points (for new games) for coaches with more than 1,000 games coached since they don't get any further points for experience.

Can you see what I think is the genius of this system? The more experienced coaches get experience points that obviously are not available to less experienced coaches. To partially or in some cases completely offset what would otherwise be an unfair advantage in the rating system, the more experienced coaches are expected to do somewhat better in winning and losing in order to achieve a net positive from their winning and losing toward their ratings. This is a primary mechanism used here that tends to even the playing field between coaches of widely differing amounts of experience, without being unfair to any type of coach. This whole project would have been largely a waste of time if I didn't have a good and fair way of varying the treatment of coaches with radically different amounts of experience.

Now here are the true net scores for playoff games:

Playoff Win True Net Score: 24 points: 20 for the win and 4 for the experience.

Playoff Loss True Net Score: Minus 24.75 points: minus 28.75 for the loss plus 4 for the experience.

PLAYOFF COACH SUB RATING
Mechanically, the playoff sub rating is simply the rating you get when you factor in only the playoffs-related factors. In the spreadsheet of the report, the Playoff Sub Ratings are just below the overall Ratings.

Two of the three sub ratings from 2008 are discontinued beginning 2009. Readers can now scan the raw data and get at least as much information as they could from the discontinued sub ratings. The only sub rating we are still publishing is the playoffs sub rating. (Who would have thought we would key in on that one, laugh out loud.)

In the December 2009 Ratings, George Karl is no longer at the very bottom of the playoffs sub ratings; he is ahead of Don Nelson thanks to Karl's Nuggets' 10-6 playoffs campaign in 2009. Golden State Warriors Coach Don Nelson is now dead last in the playoffs sub ratings. However, the deep hole that Karl dug in earlier years was so deep that the Nuggets' miraculous 2009 playoffs campaign was not enough to overall lift him very much in the playoffs sub rating. He is still showing up as a very, very poor playoffs coach, though Karl's rating is not as extremely poor as it was a year ago.

As of May 2010 Karl has now won 74 playoff games and lost 93 of them. Prior to the 2009 playoffs, Karl had won just 62 playoff games and lost 83.

======= USAGE OF BASIC REAL COACH RATINGS ========

HOW TO INTERPRET DIFFERENCES IN RATINGS
We will use Phil Jackson versus George Karl from the 2009 Real Coach Ratings, published in early December, 2009. You can see that the best cautious rating system we can produce (the one most in George Karl’s favor) and not be laughed out of the room shows that Los Angeles Lakers Coach Phil Jackson has a rating about ten times that of Denver Nuggets Coach George Karl.

You can interpret this in either of two ways. The first way to look at this is similar to the way that the Real Team Ratings are interpreted: It is about ten times more likely that Phil Jackson is a better coach and will defeat George Karl in a playoff series than the other way around, assuming the raw talent and injury situations of their teams are about the same. Given equal teams, Phil Jackson is going to beat George Karl unless something really rare is going on.

The other way to interpret this is to think of the differential between the two ratings as an amount which translates into an actual real life coaching difference. Then you plug that difference in with the other differences that determine who wins a playoff series. If the coaching difference and/or the size of the coaching component is big enough, it will result in the lesser skilled team winning the series if they have the better coach.

Even though we are unable at this time to properly estimate the actual size of the coaching factor in a playoff series, we know it is NOT negligible, trivial, or even very small. Coaching may be a small rather than a "middle-sized" factor (we don't have exact knowledge of how big a factor it is yet) but if the players between the two teams are evenly matched, then even a small difference in the coaching could determine the series and a large difference between coaches would definitely determine who wins a series between teams with equal players.

In any event, the difference between Phil Jackson and George Karl is so large that even if the coaching impact on playoff games is at the low end of the possible range, George Karl would still have to have a much better team to be able to defeat Phil Jackson in a playoff series.

The same applies to Phil Jackson versus Boston Celtics Coach Doc Rivers. We think right now (November 2009) that the 2010 Championship is about a toss-up between the Celtics and the Lakers. Phil Jackson is such a great coach that he is clearly better than even good and very good coaches such as Doc Rivers. Were it not for the Lakers' coaching advantage over the Celtics, the Celtics would have to be favored to win the Ring in 2010 by maybe 4 games to 2, since the Celtics are clearly better than the Lakers in terms of raw skill and raw potential.

CERTAIN VETERAN PLAYERS CAN COACH THEMSELVES TO A LARGE EXTENT
Always keep in mind that older, more veteran teams can coach themselves to one extent or another, particularly if the roster is both highly skilled and highly experienced. It doesn't matter who comes up with the winning schemes and patterns; what matters is that someone does. Younger teams, however, always need a good coaching staff to make headway in the playoffs.

Quest for the Ring has gone on record claiming that the 2007-08 Champion Boston Celtics are a good example of a team that could coach itself well to a large extent.

COACH OBJECTIVE #1: TO AVOID BEING FIRED
Calculations indicate that the average Real Coach Rating is currently 639 and the median is about 200. So the objective of all rookie coaches must be to increase their starting rating of 200 toward the average of 639 as soon as they can do so. You can think of the range between 200 and 600 as "the proving ground" or even the "make it or break it range" for coaches. Most coaches who drop below zero instead of going up from 200 during their first 3-6 years will be bounced out of the NBA.

Coaches who have ratings below 200 for more than about five straight years, and especially coaches who have ratings below zero for about five straigt years should be fired unless the managers and owners involved are sure that the coach has not had competitive players to work with, or are sure that the coach is getting better at his job, or unless there is some other unusual mitigating factor.

Coaches who maintain their jobs with Real Player Ratings below 200, and especially with Real Coach Ratings below zero, are frequently going to be men who have very cordial relations with the managers and owners. In other words, they are being kept on the payroll because the managers and/or the owners involved personally like the coach in question enough to brush aside any concerns about whether that coach is doing a good enough job for their team. These dubious coaches are given the benefit of the doubt, in other words, or sort of a free pass.

It is also true that some managers and owners live in fear that they might go from bad to worse if they exchange one coach for another. They simply do not have enough courage to strike out and try a rookie or a near-rookie coach, or to pick up a coach who has been fired by another team but who deserves a second chance.

The key is balance. On the one hand you don't want to be stuck out of caution or fear with a veteran coach who is simply not among the best coaches. On the other hand, you can't just strike out and pick any one who has never coached an NBA team before but seems like he might be a good coach. Rahther, you have to do a lot of homework and research. You have to spend a lot of time and make every effort to find that one in a hundred candidate who will actually become one of the better and maybe even one of the best NBA coaches.

NEVER EVER HIRE A COACH WITH A POOR PLAYOFFS RECORD IF YOU WANT TO WIN A RING
The Nuggets hired Karl despite the fact that he had a poor playoffs record and rating. When the Nuggets hired Karl, his playoffs record was 59-67. While coaching the Nuggets, Karl's playoffs record is 15-26 as of May 2010. Percentage wise, Karls' playoff record has gotten worse while he has coached the Nuggets, not better (despite 2009).

The Nuggets were wrong to hire Karl, and they are also wrong not to fire him unless he wins the NBA Championship within the next year or two. Which by the way, the Nuggets were in 2008, possibly were in 2009, and are again for 2010 talented enough to win a Championship if the coaching was top notch. Coaches with losing playoff records are fired by all truly serious NBA franchises these days regardless of regular season records. Karl had a losing playoffs record when he was hired and it has only gotten worse since.

Why did the Nuggets hire Karl? I can only speculate. The Nuggets either knew in advance they would never win the Quest with Karl and hired him anyway, or they figured incorrectly that Karl's playoff record was trumped by better aspects of Karl's record, or they decided that Karl's playoff record could be excused for irrational reasons, or there was some other unknown, off the wall reason for hiring Mr. Karl.

The most favored specific theory regarding why Karl was hired is that the Nuggets decided roughly in 2002 to go for a certain kind of player who can be a major bargain because other teams generally avoid that kind of player. The Nuggets decided to go for more volatile players who might need to be contained by a crack the whip type of coach so that they don't "fly off the reservation" and harm team cohesion and morale. Karl is in fact a good coach if you have a bunch of players more emotional and more volatile than average, because for one thing he will not hesitate to bench even players who get enraged about this, that, or the other thing. He will bench anyone at any time and for any reason, good or not.

Whatever the Nuggets' management thought, they thought wrongly. If you are a team owner or manager, you can not afford to take any risk or to make any benign assumptions or weak rationalizations when you choose a head coach. If a coach has a poor playoffs record, you have no choice but to not hire that coach if you are serious about winning the Quest. There are going to be coaches who are good enough to do well in the regular season but not good enough to prevail in the playoffs. You should not be the goober who hires one of them, obviously. Let some other franchise/team get stuck in the mud with that type of coach.

I have to be blunt here to make sure I am understood. You should never, ever do what the Nuggets did if you are serious about winning the Quest. Your coach should have a good record for BOTH regular season and playoffs. The playoff record is even more important than the regular season record.

Finally, before leaving this crucial subject, I am going to state that given the choice between on the one hand a younger coach who is considered to be a good or great up and coming coach, but who has no NBA playoff record at all, and not much of a regular season one, and on the other hand a long-term veteran coach who has a decent, good, or even great regular season record but a poor, losing playoffs record, you are better off choosing the young coach with no playoff record.

In point blank and clear summary, hiring a coach with a bad playoffs record is one of the worst things you can do if you want to win the Quest.

======= MECHANICS OF ADVANCED REAL COACH RATINGS =======

THE ADVANCED SYSTEM IMPROVES THE PLAYOFF SCORES OF THE BASIC SYSTEM
The Advanced system is added on to the basic system. Everything stays the same and carries over from the basic system except for playoff wins and playoff losses. All of the mechanics for the basic system shown above apply to the advanced system except that how playoff wins and playoff losses are dealt with by the basic system is null and void in the advanced system. In other words, from basic to advanced everything stays the same except for playoff wins and playoff losses. The advanced system replaces the playoff wins and losses awards and penalties of the basic system with a more sophisticated system.

In the advanced version, every playoff series is looked at as a unit. We start with four measures, the offensive efficiency of the two teams and the defensive efficiency of the two teams (from the regular season, of course). Efficiency is how many points scored or how many points given up per 100 possessions. Over the course of the regular season, the thousands of possessions result in precise efficiency numbers where seemingly very small differences are actually big differences between teams.

Then we subtract the defensive efficiency from the offensive efficiency to find the net efficiency for each team. Most but not all playoff teams have positive net efficiency numbers and most teams that do not make the playoffs have negative net efficiency numbers.

Then we compare the two net efficiencies and whichever team is higher is the favorite. Of course this is true in real life: the team with the better net efficiency beats the other team the vast majority of the time, although when the differences are smaller this is not so certain.

The exact difference between the two net efficiencies is crucial, because it determines the likelihood or probability of the favored team winning. The greater the difference in net efficiency, the closer to 100% the probability that the better team will win the series. We have a carefully constructed scale to translate differences in net efficiency to how many games the underdog should win on average in a best of seven game (and a best of five) series. For example, if the difference in net efficiency is 5.0, the underdog will on average win 2.3 games in a best of seven series (with the favored team winning 4 games).

Then for each playoff series, we compare the number of games won and lost by the coach versus what the average or standard number of wins and losses are. So then the advanced version breaks down games within playoff series results as follows:

Underdog team wins as expected 16
Underdog team unexpected playoff wins 76
Underdog team expected wins not achieved -84
Underdog team losses as expected -23

Favored team losses as expected -23
Favored team unexpected losses -84
Favored team fewer losses than expected 76
Favored team wins as expected 16

Wins by the favored team get 16 points (instead of 20 that they get in the basic). But unexpected wins, which are extra wins by the underdog team or fewer losses by the favored team get almost five times that many points: 76. Note that if a coach coaches his team to an upset playoff series win, his award would be the difference between the 4 wins it takes to win the series and the number of wins he was “supposed to” get times 76.

Unexpected losses are minus 84 points each and consist of underdog teams winning even fewer games than they were supposed to (and still losing the series) and favored teams losing more games than they were supposed to (but still winning the series). If a favored team loses the whole series then the penalty is the difference between the four wins the underdog team won and the number of wins the underdog team was supposed to win in the series.

Unexpected wins and losses are rewarded and penalized heavily but not excessively. Unexpected playoff losses are one of the worst things that can happen to a team and a franchise, because they waste the owners’ money, because they partly waste the efforts of a lot of players and managers, and because they make the franchise less likely to attract top free agents. Unexpected playoff losses are a nightmare and the fewer of them you have the better.

Note that unexpected playoff losses are in theory supposed to be largely offset by unexpected playoff wins. Most coaches are going to have a series once in awhile where his team performs below standard, but these will be mostly offset by that coaches’unexpected playoff wins.

This is the most crucial thing you have to keep in mind: the main purpose of the advanced system is to on the downside flush out and penalize coaches who have more unexpected playoff losses than unexpected playoff wins. On the upside, the primary purpose of the advanced system is to flush out and to award coaches who have more unexpected playoff wins than unexpected playoff losses.

In other words, the main purpose of the Advanced Real Coach Rating system over and above the Basic system is to assign unexpected playoff wins and losses to coaches so that coaches whose methods work better in the playoffs than in the regular season are identified and so that coaches whose methods work worse in the playoffs than in the regular season are identified.

Quest for the Ring already knows many of the basketball strategies and tactics that work better in the playoffs than in the regular season, and you do to if you read this site because we review and illustrate most of them from time to time.

======= USAGE OF ADVANCED REAL COACH RATINGS =======
When every playoff series that a coach has ever coached has been evaluated, we will be able to correctly assign that coach to one of the following categories:

FINAL CLASSIFICATION OF COACHES BASED ON ADVANCED REAL COACH RATINGS
A: 2,000 and more: An excellent, top of the line coach to have if you want to win the Quest for the Ring
B: 1,200 ti 2,000: A good or maybe a very good coach to have if you want to win the Quest for the Ring
C: 500 to 1,200: A decent but probably just mediocre coach to have if you want to win the Quest for the Ring
D: 0 to 500: A poor to mediocre at best coach to have if you want to win the Quest for the Ring
E: minus 500 to 0: A very poor coach to have if you want to win the Quest for the Ring; you have only a very, very small chance to win the Ring with this type of Coach.
F: minus 500 and less: A terrible, nightmare coach to have if you want to win the Quest for the Ring; you will definitely not win the Quest with a Coach this bad

Once the system is fully operational, Quest for the Ring will guarantee that any coaches who are given an F will never, ever win the Quest. If an F coach ever wins the Quest, we will shut down this site and apologize for being grossly wrong, but trust me, that will never happen. Whether we will issue the absolute guarantee for E coaches is under review; suffice it to say for now that E coaches have only a trivial chance of ever winning the Quest.

In general, as you might already realize, the lower the grade of the coach, the better the players have to be to win the Quest for the Ring...

Coach is an A: Players need to be at least very good
Coach is a B: Players need to be at least very, very good
Coach is a C: Players need to be extremely good
Coach is a D: Players need to be historically good-one of the best teams of all time
Coach is an E: Players need to be about the best team of all time.
Coach is a F: There is no possible way any set of players can possibly win the Quest

======= CAUTIONS REGARDING BASIC AND ADVANCED REAL COACH RATINGS ========

THE WIDELY DIFFERENT AMOUNTS OF EXPERIENCE PROBLEM
There is one big hurdle (or notable shortcoming if you want to be negative) in the Real Coach Ratings, and we have largely but probably not completely solved the problem as of 2009. This problem originates in the huge discrepancies in the amount of experience between long-term veteran coaches and much younger coaches. To some extent this makes comparing NBA coaches like trying to compare apples and oranges rather than like trying to compare various apples.

In the 2008 User Guide, this was what I had to say about this issue when I tackled it for the first time:

2008 WORK ON THE EXPERIENCE DISCREPANCY PROBLEM
As I was working on this I often had a sinking feeling that trying to fairly compare coaches with more than 10 years of experience with those with less than 2 years experience would be in the end impossible. But I persevered and scrapped and fought my way to the goal line and got it done. I achieved all of the balancing that I needed to achieve. Specifically, for example, I kept the points given for experience within reason, while making sure that regular season and playoff losses were penalized to the full extent they should be.

You must keep in mind that any coach who has been fired for not winning enough in the regular season, for not winning enough in the playoffs, or for both, and has not been rehired by another team, is not on this list. We don't care about them. The whole idea in multi-billion dollar professional sports is to win more than you lose, and that most obviously and most definitely includes the coaches. So a 50/50 record in either the regular season or in the playoffs is not good enough long term, and coaches who are not better than .500 get fired and not rehired sooner or later, and those who have met that fate already are not on this list.

To reflect the reality that coaches who can not win more than they lose are sooner or later going to be fired, and will most likely never advance in the playoffs before they are fired, it is necessary to make sure that losses entail a bigger negative number than do wins entail a positive number. But we have to avoid getting carried away. So when I add in the amount given for experience, the apparent gap between the award for winning and the penalty for losing is shrunk down to a small amount.

2009 WORK ON THE EXPERIENCE DIFFERENTIAL PROBLEM
Notice that in 2008 I said “we have to avoid getting carried away” in the 2008 attempt to solve this problem. Well, it turns out I probably did get a little carried away. The heavily experienced coaches with a lot of losses were being hammered a little bit too much!

So the number of points subtracted for losses were slightly reduced for 2009. Regular season losses are now minus 5.75 (instead of minus 7).

However, due to another consideration, playoff losses are slightly greater minuses in 2009 than they were in 2008.

Where we are right now is that we are in very good shape overall, but out of respect for conservatism we may still have a small problem left with the experience discrepancy problem. In a nutshell, we decided to take the risk that the problem is not completely solved so as to avoid being overly harsh toward certain long-term coaches. "First, do no harm..."

When all is said and done, everyone, including a bad coach, can possibly improve even after many years of not improving. This fact, which we didn’t allow for last year, is the biggest reason why we tweaked the way we did. Unfortunately, the price for this is the real possibility that the experience discrepancy problem is not completely solved.

SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT REWARDS AND PENALTIES BASED ON EXPERIENCE
Even after the tweaking, this feature of the system goes a long way toward solving the experience differential problem. Here is how it works:

In the case of all coaches who have coached fewer than 600 games (which is currently 17 out of 30 of them) since a full point is given for every regular season game for just the experience factor, and since the award for a regular season win is 4 points, and since the penalty for a regular season loss is minus 5.75 points, these younger, less experienced coaches do slightly better than break even just by achieving a 50/50 regular season record. When you combine the win or loss points with the experience point, a win earns a new coach a total of 5 points, while a loss earns him minus 4.75 points.

The new coaches are learning, so the system must be slightly easier on them. They can not be expected to know everything right now that they will know in a year or two or three or four. And if they learn the right things, than they might become the next Phil Jackson or Rick Adelman!

Coaches who have coached more than 600 games but fewer than 1,000 games must do a little better than .500 in the regular season to achieve a net positive toward their overall Real Coach Ratings. These coaches get 4.25 points for each regular season win and lose 5.5 points for each loss.

The long-term veteran coaches who have coached more than 1,000 games get no experience points at all. So they get 4 points for each regular season win and lose 5.75 points for each regular season loss.

For the playoffs, all coaches have the same total (including the four experience points) gain or loss: 24 points for a playoff win, and minus 24.75 points for a playoff loss.

REMAINING EXPERIENCE DISCREPANCY PROBLEM
The worst of the long-term veteran coaches probably have ratings that are slightly higher than what they really should be. If a Coach has received some "lucky breaks" by not being fired after bad losing seasons, and/or after bad losses in the playoffs, and he has over the years now accumulated 1,000 or more regular season games and 100 or more playoff games, his rating will likely still be in effect slightly distorted on the high side relative to the other coaches.

This is because the long-time veteran Coach, who could have been fired a long time ago but was not fired, will max out on the experience points, and he will also have a few winning seasons to go with the losing seasons. The sum of the maximum experience points (which is 700 for regular season experience plus four times the number of playoff games) plus any positive net from winning seasons will tend to more than offset all the losses from the year(s) he might have been fired, despite the heavy negatives that losses carry.

Another way of thinking about this issue is that assuming a long-term veteran Coach has a too high rating due to the above, keep in mind that Coach would not even be in the ratings had he actually been fired. Coaching a professional sports team is about the worst job in existence for job security, since the vast majority of coaches are involuntarily fired.

Yet another way of focusing on this problem is realizing that pro basketball coaches are fired or not fired based on different criteria.

We can not simply remove experience from the set of factors, since in every single career there is, the more experience you have, the better you tend to be. Moreover, even if we did reduce or remove the experience factor, the same problem would still be there in the case of coaches who probably should have been fired, but are not and then end up fortunately coaching very skilled teams in subsequent years, thus piling up wins with those teams.

In other words, we have no choice but to proceed as if all coaches face the same criteria as to whether they are fired or not, even though we know that some coaches, especially veteran coaches, are treated much more leniently than others

One other thing to keep in mind about long-term veteran coaches (the ones with more than 1,000 regular season games coached) is that once such a Coach gets older than 60, 65, and then maybe even 70 years old, that Coach's abilities will probably be less than they were when he were younger. Whereas almost all coaches with little experience are under the age of 55.

For example, Utah Jazz Coach Jerry Sloan is 68 years old on March 28, 2010, so it is possible that he is a little too old now for maximum effectiveness.

The bottom line is that there will be a small number of older, veteran coaches whose ratings are misleading on the high side. Unfortunately, we are unable to completely correct for this or to properly estimate the amount of the unavoidable distortion at this time.

So we advise you when looking at the ratings to make sure you give the benefit of the doubt to younger coaches who seem to have good potential. The coaches whose ratings are most likely distorted upwards would be, at the moment, in order of the most likely amount of distortion, George Karl, Don Nelson, and Larry Brown. It is plausible, for example, that young Miami Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra is as good or better a Coach right now as is Don Nelson.

PROBABLE DOWNSIDE DISTORTIONS
The flip side of the above distortion is also going to be a problem sometimes. If you have a younger coach who has just started out, and he has a bad team to start with (and a lot more new coaches start with bad teams than good ones) then his rating will be much lower than it will be in future years if he avoids getting fired and in the future gets much better teams to work with.

However, it is also very possible that in most cases the worst teams get only the medium and poor coaches, that in other words the really good coaches never have to start out coaching a bad team, so that any downside distortions are small and mostly moot points.

Generally speaking, we are still working on a way to make the comparisons between long-time veterans and much younger, newer coaches more valid than they are in the current system. We hope of course to make a breakthrough or two for next October's Report.

BE CAREFUL REGARDING THE VERY LARGE TIME SCALE OF THESE RATINGS
Keep in mind that each coach is rated using information from every season that he has been a head coach in the NBA. It is very plausible that some of the coaches will currently be substantially better or substantially worse than their overall career ratings indicate.

But while I am on this subject, I want to warn you to not make the assumption that all or even most coaches get better as they accumulate more and more experience. There is no empirical evidence I know of to back that sweeping generalization up, and nor is it in my view obvious or even likely to be true most or much of the time. It is plausible that coaches do not really improve that much after roughly 5 or 6 years of experience. It is also plausible that some of the heaviest experience coaches have not completely updated their beliefs and coaching schemes to reflect the current ways of basketball. They may be hurting their teams a little or even a lot by persisting with strategies and tactics that used to work well years ago but are not working very well in the NBA in 2008.

IF YOU COMPLETELY DISTRUST THE RATINGS
Even if you distrust the ratings themselves, you can evaluate the raw data yourself because Quest for the Ring beginning in 2009 provides the entire spreadsheet on which the Ratings are calculated.

FUTURE CHANGES TO THE BASIC AND THE ADVANCED REAL COACH RATINGS
Are the factors set in stone forever and ever? No, but adjustments will be few, far between, and minor in the coming years. Although this is not a perfect system, it is at the very least a very good system. And it is light years ahead of having no system at all with which to fairly compare coaches of radically differing amounts of professional basketball head coach experience.