The first perspective is a business one. Everybody is his own entrepreneur. So, as a coach you have the target to get the best job for the best possible money. Means the best coach is the one who manages to get hired by the most famous franchises for the biggest salaries. It doesn’t really matter too much what you did do as a coach in detail, in the very end it just does matter that the most famous franchises are going to choose you. Maybe you are just an excellent salesman, a very good entertainer, a good looking man with a very self-confident approach and charisma what make other people believe: This is the man! That’s it. Finish. We close the book and declare Jose Mourinho (Real Madrid) and Louis Van Gaal (Bayern Munich) the best coaches in football (soccer) and Ron Wilson (Maple Leafs) plus John Tortorella (Rangers) as some of the best coaches in hockey. For some reason they did make the owners of these franchises to hire them. Actually this is a clear, straight forward and honest perspective. Hired by the best franchises for very good money!
Of course – you most probably already guess it… - this is also a simple, a very simple, a too simple perspective but a perspective you very often can find in the sports-media, especially in the ones with the very big letters and the very short main-clauses.
If you are a person who likes simple solutions, clear truths and clear untruthfulnesses you can stop here to read, you’ve got it already!
Personally I really dare to make it more complicated. I’m very seldom happy with simple ideologies although I admire the philosophical approach: “Beauty is simple and straight forward…” but just not in judging coaches.
I dare to tell
that if I – a simple football/soccer fan with close to non soccer-coaching-education – would be the coach of Real Madrid in the Spanish League – I would finish in the league-standings not worse than 4th place… and if I would be hired as the CEO of a world-famous bank I’m not so sure whether my year-end-result would be much worse than it is with the CEOs who are now in charge. I also want to refer to Adam Smith’s book “An Inquiry into Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” - by the way this is maybe one of the most important books in the history of economic thought – according to Smith, the managers charged with supervising the daily operation of a firm are nothing more than “principal clerks”. He definitely didn’t overrate the impact of managers on the success or failure of an organization. And in my opinion the same goes for head-coaches in sport-teams. In this on first sight very bold statement you can find between the lines what I want to tell you undermentioned.
I want to tell you that I’m pretty sure that there is a big amount of coaches in all sports who would be as good as the Mourinhos, Van Gaals, Wilsons and Tortorellas in terms of actual performance as a coach, of course not in terms of selling- and networking-skills. E.g. Ottmar Hitzfeld – coach of the Swiss football national-team – one of the most famous soccer-coaches worldwide is very well comparable with his predecessor, Köbi Kuhn. Nobody on this planet (except the Swiss) knows Köbi Kuhn, and his charisma is light-years below the one of Ottmar Hitzfeld. Köbi Kuhn did never ever had any success as a professional team-coach – he had somehow decent results with the Swiss junior-nationalteam, that’s it. These two coaches coached more or less the same team, the Swiss national-team and both had more or less the same results. If I would dig a bit deeper about the results I would even find that Köbi Kuhn was slightly better… And this with the same team, the same players what makes it a very fair comparison. My inner feeling did tell me similar things since many years also in hockey but I actually never did go so far trying to proof it. Lately I did start to go into this much deeper and not surprisingly I did find the following results of sport-studies in the book “stumbling on wins”. I admire North American Sports-Culture. It is really advanced in terms of scientific studies about all possible aspects in pro-sports and this makes the discussions so much more factual. They did do some detailed studies about factual success of NBA-coaches. Not surprisingly they did find out that the most successful coaches in terms on winning championships are the ones of teams with the best players.
Other examples:
African National football-teams did enter the World-Cups many years ago with local coaches. Everybody admired their enthusiastic style but chuckled and the common truth was that they need just European coaches to make them play a more realistic style and then they will make the next steps towards Championships. Since this time I did watch all sort of coaches from all over the world in these African countries. Experienced coaches, intellectual coaches, ridiculous coaches, young, dynamic coaches…and you know what? They all had more or less the same results. African football-teams are still good enough to advance to a certain point in the World-Cup but not much further. There are no significant factual differences with whatever system, whatever coach, whatever something they try to improve. It’s still Brasil, Italy, Argentine, Germany, lately Spain and more or less Holland who dominate world-football and this again with completely different coaches. It actually doesn’t matter much. Italy became world-champion with Marcello Lippi four years ago and with exactly the same coach they completely failed in 2010. So… success or failure is not so much the influence of a coach, it’s more the players…and if not the players…some other, still uncovered influences… as this example with Marcello Lippi shows.
Is the influence of a coach overrated?
I don’t want to find an answer to this question I want to find an answer to the question “what is a good coach”? In my opinion a good coach is when players play better than they play with other coaches. This means if a coach can make the players playing better over a long period and in different teams than other coaches could do, this tells me that he is a good coach. But this can happen in a 3rd-level pro-league as well as in the Stanley-Cup-Final. In the NBA they did find out that just one single coach did manage to reach this target. They did follow and measure everything about the ones of Pat Riley, Lenny Wilkins, Georg Carl all the other big names and they did find out that just Phil Jackson had a record of long term and returning better stats of players when they played for him. Just one single coach who had measurable better results than the others in the long term! This study of coaches stands in contrast with the conventional wisdom. Coaches are often credited with the wins and losses of their respective teams. Those coaches with better records are believed to be better coaches. For most coaches, though, one can’t find any statistically significant impact on player performance. This suggests that for most coaches, their win-loss record is ultimately about their players. Give the coach productive players, and he will coach a winner. Give the coach unproductive players, though, and suddenly the coach is a loser. Does this mean the head coach doesn’t matter? No, this is not what the research is saying. But it’s telling that most coaches produce similar results if they work with the same players but most coaches is not every coach and it also tells that most coaches are good coaches because the study didn’t compare the head-coach-results with an arm-chair-coach.
Conclusion:
As I did tell in a blog before: You have to have the target to find the best possible coach. This is nothing but a professional approach and I would take this very serious. At the same time I do really believe that it is in the sport-business the biggest hiring-challenge to find a so called no-name-coach who is at least as good as the supposed superstar-coaches. And I am a strong believer that this is a very realistic target. I admire Pittsburgh Penguins GM Ray Shero’s brave decision to promote no-name-coach Dan Bylsma as head-coach of the NHL-team. In my eyes it’s very likely that you will find very good coaches if you scout just in your local area, watching Minor-Pro or even amateur- or junior-games in whatever sports compared to the Major-Leagues. The problem is, just a handful GMs believe that some of these coaches would be as successful as the Mourinhos, Wilsons’ and Tortorellas.
And to come to an end and
answer the question in the headline:
A good coach makes his players better than they were before with other coaches. Good coaches increase productivity of players.
Last but not least:
Please don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t hire myself as a head-coach of Real Madrid or as the CEO of a world-famous bank, I’m not qualified enough for these jobs, but still… I do stand to my according statements…
Thomas
No comments:
Post a Comment