https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/31024144/an-nba-double-standard-hindering-black-head-coach-candidates


An NBA double standard is hindering Black head coach candidates
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Mar 8, 2021
Kevin Pelton
ESPN Senior Writer

When the Minnesota Timberwolves fired head coach Ryan Saunders last month and made the rare in-season move to hire Toronto Raptors assistant coach Chris Finch -- bypassing Wolves associate head coach David Vanterpool, who is Black -- it renewed the conversation about the NBA's hiring practices for coaches.

"It's discouraging," one Black NBA assistant coach told Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated.

The NBA's shift away from Black head coaches has been well-documented. Better representation in management was among the issues Miami Heat guard Avery Bradley, as leader of a coalition of concerned players, wanted the NBA to address ahead of its restart last summer.

Less discussed, however, has been another trend reflected by the Timberwolves' decision to hire Finch -- who, like Saunders, is white and did not play in the NBA -- over Vanterpool, who played briefly with the Washington Wizards.

The NBA has long had a double standard when it comes to how much playing experience is required for coaches of different races. Even as the league embraces nontraditional paths to the sideline, that double standard is hindering Black candidates from breaking through.

Coaching ranks trending away from ex-NBA players
As recently as the 2012-13 season, 14 of the NBA's 30 head coaches to start the campaign were Black -- a high point in league history. Within three years, that number had dropped by half. It remains at seven now, having been slightly higher at times in the interim.


The decline in Black head coaches is best understood by looking at the trend in another category: head coaches who also played in the NBA. During the 1990s and 2000s, a majority of the NBA's head coaches had played in the league. In 2008-09, that figure was 77% (23 of 30). Since then, however, that number has steadily trended downward. The nine head coaches with NBA playing experience at the start of this season tied for the lowest percentage at any point since the NBA-ABA merger in 1976.


Looking at first-time head coaches, the change in the NBA's thinking is even starker. Since the start of the 2017-18 season, Finch is the 14th newcomer to be hired as a head coach. Of those, only Brooklyn Nets head coach Steve Nash played in the league and just two (Lloyd Pierce and Stephen Silas) are Black.

It's not at all clear that NBA playing experience is necessary to be a successful head coach. Gregg Popovich, the league's winningest and longest-tenured active head coach, never played in the NBA. Neither did Erik Spoelstra or Frank Vogel, the coaches of the two teams that met in last year's NBA Finals, nor the coach of the team with this season's top record (Quin Snyder of the Utah Jazz).

Yet it is clear that the move away from valuing NBA playing experience has hurt Black coaches, who have historically been disproportionately likely to have played in the NBA.

Different standard for Black coaches
Since the merger, 237 head coaches have walked the NBA sidelines on a full-time or interim basis. I researched the playing background of these coaches, and the racial disparities are striking.

NBA Head Coaches
PLAYING EXPERIENCE TOTAL BLACK BLACK%
NBA 124 62 50%
Non-NBA 113 14 12%
Since 1976 merger
While former NBA players who become head coaches are about equally likely to be Black and white, the same is not true for head coaches who did not play in the NBA. Put another way, 81% of Black NBA head coaches played in the league, as compared to just 39% of all other head coaches.

The disparities grow even more extreme as we look at head coaches who were less accomplished as players. Here's a breakdown of head coaches with no NBA playing experience by the highest level at which they played:

Head Coaches (No NBA Playing Experience)
PLAYING EXPERIENCE TOTAL BLACK BLACK%
Some Pro 17 3 18%
Div. I only 58 10 17%
Outside Div. I 33 1 3%
Since 1976 merger
It's possible for Black players who reached Division I or played professionally overseas to become NBA head coaches, but for those who topped out at lower levels, the door has historically been closed. Although some of the NBA's most accomplished white head coaches played at the Division II (John MacLeod), Division III (Bill Fitch, Brad Stevens, Jeff and Stan Van Gundy) and NAIA (Del Harris) levels or not at all in college (Mike Fratello and Dick Motta), their Black counterparts have not received those same kind of head-coaching opportunities.

Remarkably, there have been just two Black NBA head coaches who did not play at least Division I college basketball or professionally, both of them serving in an interim role. Ed Tapscott, who played at Division III Tufts and coached at American University before beginning a career as an NBA executive, was working in the Wizards' front office when he was asked to finish the 2009-10 season as interim head coach. Draff Young, who played Division II basketball at HBCU Johnson C. Smith University, coached four games for the Kansas City-Omaha Kings in 1973-74 before the team hired Phil Johnson as a replacement for Bob Cousy.

Fewer Black NBA players become head coaches
So far, we've been discussing coaching backgrounds without considering the size of those pools. While Black candidates making up 50% of head coaches with NBA playing experience seems superficially balanced, it's worth remembering that the league's players are predominantly Black. To account for this, I took a look at all American NBA players who saw action in the 1990s, then determined the percentages who have become either head coaches or front-office decision-makers to date.

1990s NBA Player Pool
RACE # HC DM HC% DM%
Black 747 35 11 4.7% 1.5%
White 195 18 11 9.2% 5.6%
During the 1990s, Black players outnumbered their white counterparts nearly 4 to 1. In that context, the fact that there have been nearly twice as many Black head coaches as white head coaches from this pool -- actually an improvement from previous decades, based on our data about all coaches since 1976-77 -- still makes white NBA players twice as likely to become head coaches.

The disparity is even greater when it comes to front-office lead decision-makers, where an even split means white players in the 1990s have been almost four times more likely to attain those positions. All told, better than one in seven American-born white players in the 1990s has gone on to hold a top spot in either coaching or management in the NBA. For American-born Black players, it's less than one in 16.

More opportunities for non-players
One way in which the decrease in hiring ex-NBA players as head coaches can be explained is the increasing size of coaching staffs over the past two decades. During the 1999-2000 season, shortly before then-new Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban innovated by adding three "player development" coaches to nearly double the size of his team's staff, NBA teams had an average of 1.4 assistant coaches who had played in the NBA and 1.8 who had not.

Some two decades later, the average team in 2019-20 had slightly more assistant coaches who had played in the NBA (1.7, up 21%) but dramatically more who had not (4.4, a whopping 248% increase).

NBA Assistant Coaches
SEASON TOTAL AVERAGE FORMER NBA AVERAGE NON-NBA AVERAGE
1999-00 92 3.2 41 1.4 51 1.8
2019-20 183 6.1 52 1.7 131 4.4
(Note that these figures neither include "player development" coaches without assistant in their title nor assistant coaches with other full-time duties, most notably assistant coach/video coordinators and advance scouts.)

As a result of this shift, the percentage of NBA assistant coaches with playing experience in the league dropped from 45% in 1999-2000 to 28% in 2019-20 -- similar to the percentage of head coaches with NBA experience at the start of this season (30%). Larger coaching staffs have given more coaches without high-level playing experience the opportunity to grind their way up through the ranks.

Relatively fewer of those positions have gone to Black coaches. According to annual reports from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida (TIDES), the percentage of Black NBA assistant coaches peaked at 46% in 2013-14, before dropping to 37.1% in 2018-19 -- the lowest percentage in the previous 14 seasons.

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