There is an old saying in NBA circles: if the team wins, it is the players. If the team loses, it is the coach.
At times, this is truly a thankless job. Unless you have been an NBA coach, it is difficult to understand the work and pressures that go with the job. But what is lost in the victory or defeat is the countless hours spent preparing for the game. The fans only see the result during the game, never truly appreciating the work that goes into a game plan.
Every win or loss starts with the framework of a game plan.
A typical head coach will watch at least four of his upcoming opponent's games. The most recent games played and the last game that the two teams played each other. They will sift through the countless plays from each game - including all the variations. For all these plays he must come up with a defensive strategy. How to defend the pick and roll or guard the post, etc. Then he must decide which of his plays give the best advantage. Then there are the personnel, tendencies and mismatches. The preparation list is endless. After all that, he must then decide how to distill the information into a form the players can remember and use in the game.
Too much information can be just as bad as not enough. Forget about the monkey wrench of missing players or injuries.
The coach’s biggest issue is always managing people. How do you balance discipline, teaching and managing egos? Not all players are created equal. You have young players, players in their prime and then the older veterans. There are stars, role players and end of the bench guys. All their needs are different but as part of the team, the coach must get them all what they need to excel.
The Clipper roster has tremendous talent and depth but Chauncey Billups and Grant Hill are still injured, while Lamar Odom is still getting in shape and learning the system. It will be great when they are all back and 100 percent. But this creates other problems of integration and playing time which falls to the coach. Expectations are sky high for the Clippers, which only adds to an already pressure packed job.
No one knows or has a better pulse of the team than its coach. His job is always a balancing act. Rest, practice time and film sessions are all necessary but time consuming. A coach must always be patient, realizing that many times it takes a couple steps backward to put together the big picture. A long season is always a grind; a coach must keep in mind what is non-negotiable and when to look the other way.
Any game may be over, but a coach's work is just getting started. They have a long night of breaking down that night's game, watching their next opponent's games and developing the next game plan. All this must happen before the coaches meeting early the next morning followed by the team meeting. If lucky, a coach may get a few minutes of rest before he goes over to the arena a couple hours before the game.
Then it starts all over again, 82 times a year.
