CLIP: What It Takes to Be a Good NBA Head Coach in 2026

**Wes Goldberg** (0:00)
All right, let's talk about head coaches. Mo, before we went to that break there, you were talking about that ability to see what the next thing coming is in terms of style of play and all these other things. And that's obviously also on the head coach as well. I think this is a good time to pivot into this head coach conversation. Jared, I wanna start with you on this, because when you think about who the most successful head coaches in the league are, I actually had a hard time with this because not a lot of them had a ton in common. But when you think about a great head coach in 2026, what qualities does that person have and what would you be looking for in a head coach if you were hiring one this year?

**Jared Dubin** (0:36)
So Mo and I have talked about this a bunch of times on our show. The number one biggest thing you can do as a head coach is figure out a way to get buy-in from your players because nothing else is gonna matter if you don't have the players believing in what you're trying to sell them. Like if you don't have that, then you don't have anything in a similar way to where if you don't have buy-in from ownership, then you don't have anything as a general manager or a lead basketball decision maker. You have to have the buy-in of the players because nothing else that you want to do is gonna work if you don't have that. Then I think you have to have a way to give your team an advantage on a night-to-night basis, whether it's through your preparation or your ability to set a culture or your ability to be tactical on one end of the floor, the other, or hopefully both. Like you have to be giving your team an advantage on a night-to-night basis. Otherwise, I feel like your team should be looking for a new head coach.
Then it's just, I think an openness to new ideas whether it comes from the players or the assistant coaches. Like you have to, in a similar way to how I said, like a general manager or lead decision maker has to have flexibility and a willingness to deviate from the path that they set for themselves. Coaches have to do that too. Again, we saw this with the Knicks where they completely deviated from their offensive plan in the middle of the playoff series against the Hawks, and things opened up to a new level for them.
Unsurprising, I thought about a lot of this stuff through the prism of the Knicks because they literally just won the title. But I think that those three things are really important.

**Wes Goldberg** (1:57)
Mike, what about you?

**Mike Shearer** (1:58)
Yeah, I think just drilling a little deeper into something that Jared touched upon, I think it's relationship management is still going to be your first thing, most notably with your star player and with your general manager or lead decision maker, your LDM. So I think of what happened to the Nuggets with Mike Malone and Calvin Booth as being the worst possible outcome between a relationship between a decision maker and a coach. It literally like torpedoed the team.
You had the general manager bringing in players, the coach didn't want to play and the coach would spitefully not play those players, and that just sank everything. You need to have everybody rowing in the same direction. Doesn't mean you have to like each other, but I think the best coaches have shown that they can flourish under a number of different lead decision makers. Ricardo is a great example, I think, of somebody like that. The same thing goes with your player, because if your star player doesn't like you, you're probably not going to be around for all that long.
How many different coaches have we? At this point, the hierarchy is very clear on almost every team. The star is going to be number one, and the head coach is going to be number two. That's not always true, but it's usually true. I think the best coaches have figured that out and are able to have these tough conversations with stars where it's like, yeah, we'll play the way you want to play to some extent, but you need to compromise and play the way that I want to play to some extent as well. It's not always going to be Popovich and Tim Duncan, but you need to be able to have this back and forth where there's mutual respect in the office, in the locker room, in the huddle, et cetera. I always think to one of the worst examples of this being LeBron grabbing the clipboard out of David Blatt's hand and drawing up a new play in the playoffs. I think it wasn't like, this obviously got blown out of proportion a little bit, I think in the media, but it was an example of just somebody just taking the steering wheel away, and suddenly it's like, okay, this probably isn't going to be a tenable long-term relationship.