Help for Mavericks, Nuggets, and Other Fans is on the Way: Coaches who will Never, Ever win the Quest for the Ring to Soon be Exactly Identified

This is just a quick and possibly just a temporary post (to be deleted later) to inform visitors of something very important that is in the works. For years now I have been doing basketball under certain assumptions, some of which are virtually unique to me and this site. One of the most important and one of the most unique assumptions is that upsets are very rare in basketball playoff series. Unlike in other sports where true playoff upsets are not rare, playoff series in basketball are generally won by the team that is supposed to win them, which would be the team with the best players and best coaching.

Moreover, in any basketball playoff series, if you know what you are doing, you can know in advance about how many games the losing team should win in that series (which will be zero, one, two, or three).

Having the best players is generally much more important than having the best coaching. However, whenever two teams are not very different in how good the players are, there is a possibility that the coaching will decide the series.

One aspect of the above claims, namely, that there are playoff games and series that are decided by the coaching rather than by the players, has been repeatedly stated here at Quest but not as yet proven exactly and beyond a shadow of a doubt. But after witnessing the San Antonio Spurs win over the heavily favored Dallas Mavericks and the Utah Jazz win over the heavily favored Denver Nuggets here in 2010, I am now motivated to get some hard, beyond the shadow of a doubt type of proof posted up at this site.

Because Dallas and Denver: the only reason your teams did not win is that the coaching of your teams was inferior to the coaching of the other teams. Teams should not lose a playoff series due to inferior coaching but both of your teams just did.

Coaches who have been getting away with murdering their teams due to turning playoff wins into losses will for the first time be carefully and precisely identified. I say precisely because I am going to give you very close estimates of how many playoff games each coach has blown due to inferior coaching and how many playoff games each coach has won due to superior coaching. Thanks to computers and the Internet, I can calculate and report to you (and myself) this valuable information.

No more will bad coaches be hiding out in the shadows because their playoff losses are always blamed on players. No more hanging out in the darkness for coaches who win in the regular season but can't win in the playoffs, or in other words no more hanging out in the darkness for coaches who should be coaching in the D League or else coaching non-playoff NBA teams.

I am over the next week or two or so going to be working feverishly on a new data bank of playoff series and games, which will go back about 20 years to about 1990. For every playoff series, the number of games that should have been won by each team will be identified using efficiency statistics, which roughly nineteen times out of twenty do in fact tell you who should and who is going to win any playoff series. For each series, the coach will be identified and clearly shown. Then it will be an easy thing to identify the number of playoff games that a coach was supposed to win but did not, and to also identify the number of playoff games that a coach was supposed to lose but did not.

Then of course we can add up the "bonehead coach losses" and the "expert coach wins" for each coach and then combine them together to get a net coach playoff game score or count. We will then know exactly who the culprits are with respect to the proven theory that coaching matters in the playoffs even more so than in the regular season, and that there are certain beliefs, strategies, and plays that seem to work alright in the regular season but that fail in the playoffs. This data bank will instantly become one of the most important ones here at Quest, which already has a growing number of important pro basketball data banks.

Then right on the home page we will prominently show the most important summary result of these calculations, and so we will clearly identify which coaches have to be replaced if a team hopes to ever win the Quest for the Ring. Because understand this: any coach who loses a substantial number of playoff games that he should have won (after wins that should have been losses are credited as offsets) will never ever win the Quest for the Ring. Because it is a serious thing in pro basketball to lose playoff games you are supposed to (or favored to, if you prefer) win. Because, again, true upsets are rare in pro basketball playoff series. And of course, true upset playoff wins would be mathematically offset by true upset losses for coaches over time.

For example, because I already know that George Karl has lost numerous playoff games that he should have won (because he had the better team on the court) I can absolutely point blank guarantee you that George Karl will never win the Quest regardless of what players he has, ultimately because he does not understand the heart and soul of basketball. If you gave George Karl any of Phil Jackson's ten Quest winning squads he could not win the Quest with any of those squads. He might possibly get into a Championship but he would lose no later than the Championship itself with any of Phil Jackson's teams that actually won. George Karl is incapable of winning the Quest for the Ring, period.

As for Mavericks Coach Rick Carlisle, it is strongly suspected at the moment that he will be identified as someone not as bad as Karl but who is nevertheless, like Karl, someone who will never win the Quest no matter what players he has. It will probably be soon shown that either Mavericks owner Marc Cuban replaces Carlisle or the Mavericks are not going to win the Quest no matter how much money Cuban spends to obtain good and great players. And then we'll see just how Atlanta Hawks Coach Mike Woodson stacks up. And we'll see how every current (and perhaps some previous ones) stack up as well.

Let me give you a preview: Rick Carlisle and George Karl will be identified as bonehead coaches who win regular season games (mostly because they usually are blessed with better players than many or most other coaches) but who fail in the playoffs due to some combination of false beliefs about basketball, inferior basketball strategies, and insufficient or too easy to defend basketball tactics (plays). Also, Carlisle, Karl, and the other scrub coaches may win quite a few regular season games, but they don't win as many of those as they could win, meaning that they don't get for their teams as much home court advantage as they should.

So stay tuned, because this little project to take place over the next week or two is going to take our overall project a major step higher and forward, as we seek to win our own Quest for the Ring, which is the Quest to understand exactly and completely all of the hows and the whys that explain who wins the NBA Quest for the Ring.

Google can to their heart's content steer people away from this site that did know and to sites that did not know that the Nuggets were most likely going to lose to the Jazz and that the Spurs could and might beat the Mavericks. And people can falsely think this site is too boring or is not accurate all they want, but believe me, I could not care less about any of that stuff. I am not going to be stopped by anything at all. I am going to eventually win the Quest and then I'll come back for the repeat and the threepeat and so forth after that