With the Lakers predictable Finals win Phil Jackson now has a Championship Ring for each finger on both hands. This raises the debate about whether he is just a great NBA head coach, or if he's the greatest NBA head coach.
He is the Greatest NBA Head Coach.
Ever.
Reasons: He has a decade's worth of championship rings. Most by any coach ever.
In his head coaching career he has never missed the playoffs.
It is one of the hardest things to do to coach the best player in the league. He has done it twice and has succeeded. He won 6 with Michael now 4 with Kobe.
What do you think? Is Phil Jackson a great NBA head coach, or the greatest NBA head coach?
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I think when looking at something like the greatest coach of all-time the only statistic you can look at is wins.
Everything else I think is just way too arbitrary and open to interpretation to really come up with something credible.
If you look at wins, nobody has one more titles then Phil Jackson, and nobody has a higher regular season, and postseason winning percentage then Phil Jackson.
I think he is when you look at how many championship rings he has won. If you win 10 championships you got to be considered the greatest coach of all time. It's a miracle that he got all the talent he did, but he took advantage of what he got and made it work. Red Aurbach was a great coach like Phil but he had 9 championship rings with perhaps the greatest of all Boston teams back in the 50"s and 60's. So Phil is to be considered greatest coach just because of the championship's that he has won.
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I think the only person you could say is a better all time coach is Red. He won nine Championships as a coach then another seven as the Celtics General Manager
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You could make an argument for Red Auerbach, but in the end Phil ultimately has to win out.
All the titles he won as GM have to removed from the equation, because we are just talking about coaches here, not front office personal.
Phil also has one thing which Red never did, and that was he won with teams that had different makeups.
You look at the core of the Celtic teams in the 60's, Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Sam Jones, Satch Sanders, K.C. Jones, Tommy Heinsohn, Bob Cousy, Larry Siegfried, Don Nelson, they were all career Boston Celtics.
The only guy I can think of who the Celtics went outside their organization to get who really had an impact on those teams of the 60's was Bailey Howell.
With everyone else when you joined the Celtics, you stayed there.
You could not have a guy like John Havlicek coming off the bench as the Cetlics did in today's game.
Phil could win with different players, and different personal. Could Red Auerbach have done the same?
We don't know if he could have, because he never had the chance.
I also think it's really hard to compare across eras, because Auerbach never had to deal with things like a salary cap in his era. Consequently Auerbach had to deal with things Phil Jackson didn't have to deal with, so I don't think it's necessarily fair to say one era was tougher to win in then another. Each era presented it's own unique challenges.
The reason I feel Jackson wins out is because he'll last longer. Jackson has dominated basketball for close to two decades now, Auerbach did it for 16 years.
I don't think one is really more dominant then the other, but when it's tie for how good when they were coaching, I'm going to give the edge to whoever lasted longer in these types of arguments every single time, and Phil has lasted longer then Red did.
