Think back to the NBA’s 2020 Orlando bubble. It wasn’t all that long ago, right? Not even half of a decade has passed. Most of the key players are still in the league. Some of the contenders are still partially intact. At the very least, it would still absolutely be considered this era of NBA basketball.
But it absolutely isn’t the same era of NBA coaching. Of the 22 head coaches that entered the bubble, only one is still holding the same job: Erik Spoelstra. Of the eight teams that missed out, only two head coaches remain: Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr. Together, the three of them have won 11 championships.
Yet, at least recently, championships haven’t been enough to protect coaches in an increasingly impatient league. The Toronto Raptors fired 2019 NBA champion Nick Nurse four years after his title. That timeline looks downright generous today. Frank Vogel won it all in 2020 and was fired in 2022. Mike Budenholzer won it all in 2021 and was fired in 2023. Michael Malone won it all in 2023, and on Tuesday, he too was fired by his former employer, the Denver Nuggets.
This isn’t just some championship curse, either. Three of the 16 teams that reached the playoffs last season fired their head coaches afterward. A fourth, the Milwaukee Bucks, did so during the season. Adrian Griffin started his coaching career with a 30-13 record. He ended it with an unceremonious midseason dismissal. Before Malone, this season’s most surprising change came only two weeks ago, when the Memphis Grizzlies dumped Taylor Jenkins. He was 44-29 at the time and had earned No. 2 seeds in the last two full, healthy seasons his roster gave him. Those two moves were so historically unusual that you could be forgiven for forgetting that Mike Brown, the unanimous 2023 Coach of the Year, was also fired this season by the Sacramento Kings.
This is the trend in the modern NBA. The moment a team hits a speed bump, regardless of whatever success that came before, the knee-jerk reaction is to change coaches. When a trend like this takes hold, though, it’s usually because it worked for someone. But look at most of the teams that made these changes. Most of them either stagnated or even got worse.
True, there are success stories. The Lakers probably don’t regret bouncing Darvin Ham for JJ Redick, for instance, but even that comes with the caveat that they needed to downgrade from Frank Vogel to Ham in the first place. Most teams in their position aren’t so lucky.
Take the Bucks. They fired Mike Budenholzer after a 58-win season. Griffin was on pace to win 57 when he got fired, but the cracks were obvious well before then. His players had to campaign for him to reintroduce Budenholzer’s defensive schemes, for instance, when it became clear that the more aggressive tactics he favored in Toronto made little sense for the roster. The downgrade was so obvious the Milwaukee felt the need to make a change in January. It’s hard to say that the change worked. Doc Rivers finished last season 17-19 as Griffin’s replacement. This season, they will win between 45 and 48 games.
The Kings won 48 games when Brown was named unanimous Coach of the Year. A year later, with a roster that wasn’t as healthy, he won 46. The Western Conference got stronger, though, so that pushed Sacramento from the No. 3 seed all the way down to No. 9. Ownership was so unhappy with that dip that Brown almost wasn’t extended. After a 13-18 start mostly defined by poor luck in clutch settings, Brown was fired. His replacement, Doug Christie, has a superior 26-22 record this season. But the Kings under Brown played better basketball. In his 31 games, they had a +1.6 net rating. In Christie’s 48 to date, their point differential is zero. They’re playing worse but getting luckier.
Neither of these coaching changes occurred in a vacuum. Both came alongside major roster changes. The post-Budenholzer Bucks also traded Jrue Holiday for Damian Lillard. The Kings lost De’Aaron Fox in part because of their bungling of the Brown situation. This is par for the modern NBA course, and it makes judging new coaches against old ones somewhat difficult. Rarely have they worked with the same rosters.
The Phoenix Suns are a useful example for us, therefore, because they’ve changed coaches so frequently that they somehow check both boxes. In 2023, they fired Monty Williams after a second-round exit. If you include the 2023 trade deadline, Vogel had an almost entirely different roster than Williams did, and even if you don’t, only three of the nine players who gave them at least 100 playoff minutes under Williams returned to play for Vogel. That coaching change obviously didn’t work. Vogel’s Suns were swept out of the first round.
So they replaced Vogel with Budenholzer. There were minor changes to the roster, of course, with the additions of Tyus Jones and Ryan Dunn standing out. However, seven of the nine Suns that played at least 600 minutes in 2024 were on the opening night roster in 2025. Once again, things got worse. The Suns can be eliminated from Play-In Tournament contention on Thursday. There is a reasonable chance that Budenholzer, too, is fired after all of this. That would put the Suns in line to hire their fourth coach in four years.
When a team might employ four coaches in four years, are the coaches the problem, or the team? Think back on some of these hasty firings. In many cases, they can be traced back to mistakes that the front office made. Take Vogel’s tenure with the Lakers, for instance. He won a championship in his first season. In his second, he managed to cobble together the No. 1 rated defense in the NBA despite getting only 81 combined games out of LeBron James and Anthony Davis. One year after that, he was fired.
What happened in that one year? The Lakers traded all of their depth for Russell Westbrook. A lot of blame has been passed around for the Westbrook trade. The one thing we can say relatively safely at this point is that it wasn’t Vogel’s idea. He was fired, in large part, because he couldn’t fix what everybody else broke. This is shockingly common among these recent coach firings. Malone’s Denver ouster is similar. He wanted to keep winning with veterans in supporting roles. Calvin Booth wanted him to play the younger players he drafted, so he took Malone’s veterans away. Of course the team got worse when the roster got worse. That’s a pretty basic concept.
But it’s one modern teams struggle with. There’s an unspoken sentiment that a team’s trajectory needs to be upward, yes, but also linear. If a trade doesn’t upgrade the roster as much as the front office hoped, the problem isn’t the front office that made the trade, but the coach who had to adjust to it afterward. If a first-round exit doesn’t lead to a second-round trip a year later, the season is a failure. If one championship doesn’t lead to multiple championships, the coach is a failure.
It’s a practically impossible standard. There’s only one trophy at the end of the year, and the only safe coaches we covered above happen to be the only active coaches to have won it multiple times. Doing so today is, frankly, harder than it was when they did so. We’ve had six different champions over the past six years. The league has intentionally reoriented itself away from dynasties. That can’t be the only path to job security anymore.
Imagine how the modern standard might have affected some of those coaches. Does Spoelstra survive Miami’s 9-8 start with LeBron James if it comes in 2025 instead of 2010? Is Popovich kept on as San Antonio’s head coach after a 17-47 season in relief of the fired Bob Hill today? How many great coaches never would have developed into legends under different circumstances? How many coaches are losing that chance today?
None of this is meant to dissuade teams from ever firing coaches. Sometimes it’s necessary, and sometimes that necessity is apparent fairly quickly. Griffin’s shortcomings were obvious from the start. The Lakers tuned Ham out months before his dismissal. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Every situation is different. Teams need to appreciate that. They need to be able to look at a situation holistically and ask themselves if their coach is really the problem, or if he’s just the easiest scapegoat.
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