Lakers Success for Dan Hurley Wouldn’t Be Unprecedented
Lakers Success for Dan Hurley Wouldn’t Be Unprecedented
But it would be unlikely, if the history of college coaches in the NBA is any guide.
After guiding the most dominant men’s NCAA tourney run in modern history — then doing it again the very next year — what does a college coach do for an encore?
According to reporting by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, if you’re UConn’s Dan Hurley, it might be to go to the NBA and coach LeBron James.
Wojnarowski wrote on Thursday that the Los Angeles Lakers were “preparing a massive, long-term contract offer” for Hurley to become their next coach, citing L.A. brass’ “vision of marrying [Hurley’s] dominant program -- built upon his tactical acumen and his elite player development -- with the storied Lakers brand".”
If it happens, Hurley would be the first college coach with 150+ career Division I wins to come to the NBA since John Beilein’s disastrous half-season with the Cleveland Cavaliers (and Mike Miller’s late-season tenure with the New York Knicks) in 2019-20. To find a college coach who even lasted a full season in the NBA, we need to go back to Billy Donovan with the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2015-16, nearly a decade ago.
That’s all why, at this point, the reputation for ex-NCAA coaches struggling in the pros is so ingrained that even a coach as wildly successful as Hurley would have plenty of doubters if he joined the Lakers. But good college coaches haven’t been uniformly bad in the NBA — just mostly bad. Here’s that list of all coaches who won at least 150 games at the D-I men’s level, sorted by their NBA records versus .500:
Hurley represents the break-even point right now, because he hasn’t coached an NBA game yet. Above him, the list contains 13 coaches with winning records — led by Chuck Daly, who coached at Boston College and Penn before becoming a two-time NBA champion coach with the Detroit Pistons. Below Hurley, however, are 35 coaches with losing records, making up 73 percent of the non-Hurley portion of our list. The average coach on the list won 190 NBA games and lost 202 — and remember, those averages are skewed toward the coaches who stuck around longest in the NBA (i.e., the coaches who were more successful).
In other words, Hurley is going up against the history of a pretty unsuccessful group of coaches who tried to transition from the college ranks to the pros.
But it’s worth noting that most coaches lose a lot, regardless of where they make their bones. In all of NBA history, 106 coaches have a winning record, versus 241 who have a losing record. That 69 percent rate of losers (excluding .500 coaches) is pretty close to the share we saw from ex-college coaches. This game is set up to humble you quickly, no matter how much success you’ve seen in the past.
And there’s an argument to be made that now is the time when the skills of a college coach map most strongly onto its NBA equivalent. Many previous NCAA coaches were running teams under totally different circumstances, before the proliferation of TV money, early draft entries and (eventually) one-and-dones, much less NIL. It makes sense that coaches who came up in a college game where draconian leaders like Bobby Knight were the model would struggle to transition to coaching very rich, grown men in the NBA.
(It makes me think of this wildly entertaining interview between Paul George and Brian Shaw, who recounts his experience of the infamous choking incident between Latrell Sprewell and P.J. Carlesimo — a former college coach who tried to bully his NBA players around and found out how that went the hard way:)
Hurley, by contrast, had to remake his entire UConn roster after winning the 2023 national title, with a team that ranked 149th in Ken Pomeroy’s “continuity” stat and returned just 42.6% of minutes and 36.6% of points from the previous season. In an age of the transfer portal and managing NIL money, college coaches who can navigate all of that successfully might be set up to do much better in the NBA than their predecessors who could mostly focus on the X’s and O’s of on-court coaching.
Maybe the big question for Hurley is why he would leave Connecticut for the Lakers in the first place, aside from the money (and the change in climate/locale).
UConn is one of the premier men’s programs1 of the past 25 years, and Hurley has a template to stay there for a long and successful tenure in the form of Jim Calhoun, who coached the Huskies for 26 years and won more than 600 games in Storrs.2 The Lakers are among the NBA’s most storied franchises too, but joining them now means signing up for the noise of LeBron James’ contract opt-out and his short-fuse history with other coaches, Bronny James’ quixotic pursuit of an NBA career, and the circus of star demands and high expectations that generally tends to engulf this team almost all of the time.
But maybe the championship history, the huge sums of cash, the chance to work with James, and the Lakers’ “relentless” selling of the job will win Hurley over anyway. If that happens, plenty of parallels will be drawn to college coaches from the past — both successful and (mostly) unsuccessful. Those who made that transition work are indeed rare… but then again, winning in the NBA is rare no matter who you are.
Filed under: NBA
And women’s, too.
Granted, winning a national title didn’t buy Hurley’s direct predecessor, Kevin Ollie, anywhere near as long of a career at UConn.
Another terrific piece. What I so appreciate about your work, is that you put data and rigor around what are often just observations and intuition. College coaches "seemed" to struggle at the professional level - but now we know.
As I am apt to do, I will offer a few additional thoughts as to why this might be so. For starters, talent certainly matters (see Chuck Daly and Barry Switzer). Also, college coaches making the jump tend to take on struggling franchises. So, in many cases the die is cast before the contract is signed. Beyond that, as you reference, while there is some truth in the saying "it's not the X's and O's but the Jimmy's and Joe's" college programs are becoming more like their professional counterparts, making for somewhat easier transitions.
However, a crucial differentiator is the ability to quickly build effective partnerships and consensus inside the building with a wide array of constituencies. The higher up you go, the more EQ matters as much as IQ. This can be an enormous challenge for many highly touted college coaches who have operated what are essentially fiefdoms at their schools where their every wish is somebody else's command.
That's not happening in the pros. You have owners, investors, multiple front office personalities, star players, powerful agents, and a ravenous media. LA is especially challenging. Not only is AD aging and LeBron and Klutch Sports a handful, but Jeanie Buss is reportedly among the least wealthy of NBA owners, Rob Pelinka and others have a strong hand in decision-making, a notoriously engaged local media covers every real or imagined development and even Magic Johnson is an occasional advisor. The LA ecosystem is way tougher than the one in Connecticut. Way tougher and requiring different skills.
The experience of Jim Harbaugh is instructive. Harbaugh became the HC in San Francisco after two disastrous 49er stints with Mike Singletary and Jim Tomsula. He also found immediate success in the NFL after having success at Stanford - making the difficult decision to switch starting quarterbacks, winning games, gaining accolades, and even making it to the Super Bowl. Impressive accomplishments all.
Yet, going into only year four Harbaugh was already on the way out. Some of it was that his Friday Night Lights motivational shtick had become tiresome with veteran players (some even suggesting that his style was better suited for college football with its constant influx of new young players), but most of it was a reportedly contentious relationship with GM Trent Baalke which the media often characterized as a "power struggle." He wound up back at college and successful again... yet seemed to still lack the political acumen necessary to navigate treacherous waters beyond Ann Arbor.
We'll see what this trip to the NFL brings in LA, but while Harbaugh has been very good at X's and O's along with the Jimmy's and Joe's, he has appeared less adept at deftly handing authority as one would hope and instead quickly rubbing others the wrong way. Success only buys you so much cover.
At the other end of the spectrum lies Brad Stevens. A great, quiet, and humble college coach at a smaller Indiana school with an even smaller sports budget. Stevens quickly found success in the NBA at notoriously tough and demanding Boston. After 8 years, Stevens was out too - only this time to become the Celtics' GM. His ascension and success at that new role is a testament of his ability to navigate internal political waters and build consensus as much as it was his in-game rotations and substitutions.
The NBA is a completely new gig complete with a whole set of new challenges and demands. Success at this level requires new skills that many college coaches haven't had to develop in their prior roles. Some adapt and make it, many others do not as your data shows.
Predictions are tough, but one key directional indicator here is to ponder whether Dan Hurley strikes you as more like Jim Harbaugh or Brad Stevens?