The New Advanced Coach Rating System to Rate Coaches A to F; We Absolutely Guarantee F Coaches will Never Ever win the Quest

Quest for the Ring is upgrading coach reporting. We talk about coaching all the time but up until now our player performance Reports have been much more advanced than our coach performance Reports. Since Quest began, for every hour spent developing coach ratings, about 10 hours have been spent developing player ratings. This gap is being reduced.

Up until now the Real Coach Ratings have been posted just once per year, sometime between October and December. (It was always supposed to be October but y’all know about how schedules are often missed around here because that’s what happens when you have dozens of Reports you try to keep pushing out the door on a limited time budget). From now on, there will be two Real Coach Ratings Reports: one due about July 1 and the other due about October 15. The only difference between the two will be that the July 1 one will be an end of season snapshot while the October 15 one will reflect the off season coaching changes and will set the stage for the new season.

There will now be two Real Coach Ratings Reports: Basic and Advanced. The advanced one has been developed and is now in implementation.

THE BASIC REAL COACH RATING SYSTEM
Note: the following includes new parts of the complete and revised Real Coach Ratings User Guide. The complete User Guide for Real Coach Ratings has been updated and improved and is located here.

The basic Real Coach Rating system gives a set amount of points for playoff wins and a set amount of negative points for playoff losses. Specifically, playoff wins are worth 20 points toward a coach’s rating while playoff losses are negative 28.75 points. But since four points are given for experience for each playoff game coached, the real totals are 24 points for each playoff win and minus 24.75 points for each playoff loss.

For the regular season, 4 points are awarded for each win and minus 5.75 points are assigned for each regular season loss. But since one point is given for experience for each regular season game coached, the real totals are 5 points for each regular season win and minus 4.75 points for each regular season loss.

Coaches who have coached more than 600 regular season games are in effect held to a higher standard, because between 600 and 1,000 games only .25 points per game is given for experience and for games beyond 1,000 no points are given for experience. But the points for regular season wins and losses remain the same, so for long term veteran coaches who have coached more than 1,000 regular season games, 4 points are given for each regular season win and 5.75 points are taken away for each regular season loss.

This system largely offsets the heavy bias in favor of long time coaches and against newer coaches. Because they have been coaching for so long, coaches who have coached more than 600 NBA games and especially ones who have coached more than 1,000 NBA games are much less likely to be fired by owners, all other things equal.

But in fact all other things are not equal, because the majority of long term veteran coaches get to coach teams that are more talented than the NBA average. A good majority of long term veteran coaches are associated with quality team managers and owners who usually make sure the team has enough quality players on it to at least make the playoffs. Making the playoffs when you have high quality managers and a high quality owner is almost automatic regardless of who the coach is.

Micky Mouse could coach the Cleveland Cavaliers and they would most likely make the playoffs, laugh out loud.

All coaches including brand new ones are given 200 experience points. This corrects for what would be a bias against new coaches, who obviously bring previous coaching experience to the table that is not NBA head coaching experience.

Other than wins and losses in the regular season, wins and losses in the playoffs, and experience as just detailed, there are two other components to basic Real Coach Ratings:

--.25 points (1/4 of a point) are given for each game coached by the coach on his current team. The longer a coach stays with one team, the better that coach is on average, simply because he has not been fired, but also because he has more and more team-specific skills and knowledge as time goes by. For example, Jerry Sloan is more effective and valuable as the Coach of the Utah Jazz than he would be if he were suddenly coaching another team.

--30 points are given for each Championship win and 12 points are given for each Championship loss. This gives extra points to coaches who have won four and three straight playoff series, respectively, in one or more seasons. Relative to playoff game wins in general, this is a relatively small but fully justified extra award.

ADVANCED REAL COACH RATINGS
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 above apply to the advanced system except that 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). Then we net out the two for each team. Most but not all playoff teams have positive net efficiency numbers.

Then we compare the two net efficiencies and whichever team is higher is the favorite. The difference between the two net efficiencies is very important, 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 to 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 is to assign unexpected wins and losses to coaches so that coaches whose methods work better in the playoffs than in the regular season 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 repeat most of them from time to time.

FINAL BOTTOM LINE RESULT 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 coach to have if you want to win the Quest for the Ring
C: 500 to 1,200: A mediocre coach to have if you want to win the Quest for the Ring
D: 0 to 500: A poor 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
F: minus 500 and less: A terrible, nightmare coach to have if you want to win the Quest for the Ring

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

SO WHEN IS THE GREAT NEW ADVANCED REAL COACH RATING GOING TO APPEAR?
Not for awhile, I am afraid. Because there are a few hundred playoff series involved with the 30 current NBA coaches (although by the way most of the series are concentrated with just ten coaches) and because doing the breakdown as explained above takes some serious time, we can not quickly produce the advanced Report in full. All great things take serious time to produce and Quest has no staff to speak of, so we’ll all have to be patient.

However, we will do the next best thing until we are finally ready to produce a complete advanced Report: we will give you Advanced Reports on specific coaches. These Reports will show you exactly how many playoff games the coach has distorted up or down. They will also include links to biographical information.

So which coach will be the first one whose playoff performance is put under the microscope and whose Advanced Real Coach Rating is reported? I’ll give you one guess....

What a surprise, almost everyone guessed correctly: it’s George Karl! So look for very soon this Report: “Advanced Real Coach Rating and Breakdown for George Karl.” The next one after that will be for Rick Carlisle. The next one after that will probably be Greg Popovich, who almost certainly will, unlike Karl and Carlisle, have an advanced rating that is higher than his basic rating.