A Whole Different Ballgame: How NBA Coaching Changes in the Playoffs

On the coaches that disappoint in the playoffs, and the ones that don't.

Bucks head coach Mike Budenholzer with Giannis Antetokounmpo.

Imagine for a moment you are the general manager of the Milwaukee Bucks. It’s game five of your playoff series against the Miami Heat, where despite entering as the number one seed, you find yourself down three games to one. Giannis Antetokounmpo, your star player, is ailing with a back injury. Despite playing against a Heat team who limped in as the last seed, you are staring down the barrel of a first-round exit.

Tonight, however, things look to be getting back on track. You're up by two points with 2.1 seconds left in the game. You need one defensive stop to get to 3-2 in the series, where you would be feeling much better than you did tonight at 3-1. On the court, Miami looks ready to surrender. Head coach Erik Spoelstra subs out his center Bam Adebayo, indicating they’ll likely heave up a three-pointer, which your squad will be expecting. Your head coach, Mike Budenholzer, responds in kind, subbing out his center Brook Lopez. The players get set. The ref hands the ball to the inbounder.

Heat star Jimmy Butler loops out towards the three-point line, and Jrue Holiday, one of the league’s best perimeter defenders, follows closely behind. That’s when Butler cuts back towards the basket as the inbounder lobs the ball into the paint. The rim protection, Brook Lopez, is sitting on the bench. Butler catches the lob and acrobatically finishes. The game is going to overtime. The arena is silent. Your team is stunned. They lose in overtime, marking a very early exit for the number one seed. 

The analysis on SportsCenter is not kind. Spoelstra’s substitution of Adebayo, which looked like desperation, was a bluff. “We aren’t going anywhere near the paint!” he signals as he takes out his center. Budenholzer took the bait. He subbed out Lopez, your defensive anchor, and left the paint open for Butler’s heroics.

You fire Budenholzer a week later. Despite three first-place regular season finishes and two MVP awards for Giannis over his Bucks tenure, Budenholzer has only gotten the team through the Eastern Conference playoffs once. His stay in Milwaukee was defined by regular-season dominance, followed by playoff disappointment. In contrast, you see Spoelstra’s Heat doing the same thing they did to your Bucks to the Knicks in the second round. In a couple of weeks, they’ll stun the Celtics, too.

You ask yourself: Why do some coaches perform so well in the regular season and fall apart in the playoffs, while guys like Spoelstra seem to always be at their best in the postseason?

Measuring Disappointment

To address that question, we’ll need to start by framing things. Let’s start with what’s bothering us about Budenholzer: He disappoints in the playoffs. How does one measure disappointment? How we’ll think about it here is not living up to the expectations set by regular season performance. If the team wins all year and secures the one seed, their fans would be disappointed if they were knocked out after only one playoff series. Those same fans would be excited if a team who snuck in as the eighth seed won a playoff series, because the team exceeded expectations.

We can quantify that expectation from the regular season with Expected Playoff Series Wins. It's a team’s measure of how many playoff series in which they would expect to be the higher seed. To handle the differences between conferences, the metric only captures the expected wins in rounds 1-3 (before the Finals). Therefore, the number one seed would have an Expected Wins metric of 3 (they are expected to win all three rounds in the playoffs). A two-seed would be favored in their first two matchups but should be the underdog in round three, so they are expected to win two series. The three and four seeds should win in the first round, meaning they have one expected win, and the 5-8 seeds shouldn’t be expected to win any series. 

This method, of course, isn’t a perfect way of analyzing expectations. Some teams might have regular season injuries, tough schedules, or other unforeseen factors that affect their record. Additionally, a higher seed might lose early, and expectations for the teams below them would increase with the lessened competition. However, given that we’ll be aggregating each coach’s expected wins across his career, these issues should largely even out. The coaches with high expectations should have a high Expected Wins value, and those with lower expectations should have fewer Expected Wins.

To see which coaches are regularly disappointing in the playoffs and which ones are overperforming, all we have to do is compare their expected playoff wins with how many series they actually won.

We call the metric derived from comparing a coach’s expected series wins with his actual wins Rounds Won over Expectation (RWOE). For each current NBA coach (and a couple of ex-NBA coaches who had interesting numbers), we looked through every season of their career to calculate how their playoff performances compared to their regular season expectations.

What did we find? Spoelstra is the standout, almost always beating expectations in the playoffs. He has the highest number in the entire sample (8), twice as many as the next two coaches, Steve Kerr and Tyronn Lue, at four. Your suspicion that Budenholzer was disappointing in the playoffs was spot on, too. He’s tied for the worst score in the sample (-4), along with Doc Rivers, who the 76ers just fired for not getting them past the second round for the third straight year.

The metric is interesting, but unless we can get Phil Jackson to come out of retirement or convince Spoelstra or Steve Kerr to ditch great jobs near the beach, RWOE alone won’t help too much in, say, finding the next coach for your favorite team. What we’re interested in now is the why behind RWOE. What sets these top coaches apart, and how can you spot underachievers before your team gets burned?

Let’s look deeper into the coaches at both ends of the RWOE spectrum and ask: What do the Spoelstras, Kerrs, and Lues of the league do that the Budenholzers and Rivers don’t? To figure that out, we’ll have to dig a little into exactly what changes come playoff time and how the postseason demands a different skillset from coaches than the regular season.

The Run and Gun Suns: Regular Season Maximizers

The most apparent difference between the regular season and the postseason is that not everyone makes it into the playoffs. As former NBA head coach P.J. Carlesimo puts it, “People say, ‘What’s different about the playoffs?’ Well, guess what? You’re not playing the 14 teams that are under .500.” You can probably guess how that plays out across the course of the 82-game regular season: good teams can win a lot of easy games against bad teams. 

Let's think about what makes a “bad” NBA team. Generally, they are less experienced and less disciplined than the more successful teams in the league. They often struggle on the fundamentals, like rebounding, getting back in transition, and rotating well on defense. If you were trying to maximize your wins in the regular season, you might employ a strategy that picked on these deficiencies, which many NBA teams show in the more casual regular season. What would that strategy look like in practice? Something like Phoenix circa 2005.

The 7-seconds-or-less Phoenix Suns are one of the most iconic teams in NBA history. Led by head coach Mike D’Antoni and Hall of Fame point guard Steve Nash, the Suns employed a radical strategy where they tried to shoot the basketball in under 7 seconds or less in almost every possession. It was different than anything the league had ever seen, and the ‘05 iteration of the 7-seconds-or-less Suns set the league record in offensive rating. They put tremendous pressure on opposing defenses. After every Suns rebound, the defense needed to sprint back down the court, frantically calling out assignments and rotations. Any lapse in concentration resulted in an open three or an easy layup. The D’Antoni-led Suns were the number one seed in the West in ‘05, ‘06, and ‘07, never winning less than 54 games in that span. 

Mike D’Antoni with star point guard Steve Nash during the “7-Seconds-Or-Less” era.

The punchline, however, is that this Suns team never reached an NBA Finals. Each season, after leading their conference in wins, the Suns were knocked out by lower seeds in the West, once by the Mavericks and twice by Gregg Popovich’s Spurs. What changed in the playoffs? Those easy baskets their offense created in the regular season dried up against playoff opposition. The Suns' run-and-gun technique, it turned out, was much better suited to the regular season. D’Antoni’s Suns were a perennial early exit.

D’Antoni’s RWOE of -4 is tied for worst in the sample and is the same as Mike Budenholzer’s. D’Antoni’s team in Phoenix also had a lot in common with Budenholzer’s in Milwaukee. Both of them had extremely talented rosters, including two-time MVPs in Nash and Giannis. Each team also had a ton of regular season success, both finishing as the one seed three times. However, they also almost always disappointed in the postseason, seeing their offenses stall and their stars brought down to earth against playoff opposition.

D’Antoni and Budenholzer shed light on why some coaches come into the playoffs with high expectations and disappoint: they play styles built for the regular season that don't fly in the playoffs. But that still leaves us wondering: what defines high postseason performers like Erik Spoelstra or Tyron Lue?

Adjust and Advance

To understand more about our high-performing post-season coaches, we’ll put ourselves in the (virtual) stands at the 2020 COVID-19 Bubble in Orlando. Giannis Antetokounmpo had just barreled through the NBA on his way to a second consecutive regular-season MVP award. The Bucks had put away their first-round opponent with ease, and Giannis’s first trip to the NBA Finals seemed only a matter of time. Until he, quite literally, hit the wall.

Erik Spoelstra and the Miami Heat were the number five seed in the playoffs and, following their sweep of the Pacers in the first round, were set for a series with Giannis, Budenholzer, and the Bucks. The question Spoelstra faced was one that coaches had been pondering all season long: how do we stop Giannis? The difference was that Spoelstra had the answer. Determined to prevent Giannis’s 7’0”, 242-lb. frame from getting into the paint for easy layups, Spoelstra devised a radical defensive gameplan that became known as the “Giannis Wall.” Spoelstra took the Heat players who were supposed to guard perimeter shooters and aligned them in the paint to form a wall between Giannis and the basket. Despite its simplicity, it worked like a charm. Giannis’s scoring numbers plunged to 21 points per game as the Heat players dared him to pass the ball and let the Bucks’ supporting cast shoot three-pointers. The Heat disposed of the Bucks in five games, leaving Budenholzer and Giannis scratching their heads as a dominant regular season ended in the second round of the playoffs. 

The “Giannis Wall” in action.

Spoelstra’s Giannis wall is a powerful example of an important coaching trait: the ability to adjust to the opponent. Yet there was nothing stopping coaches from trotting out their own Giannis wall before the postseason; why are adjustments any more potent in the playoffs than in the regular season? The reason has to do with the familiarity afforded by a 7-game series.

In addition to being rid of the 14 bottom-dwelling teams, the playoffs also differ from the regular season in their structure. In the regular season, teams play 82 games. They face every other team at least twice but never more than four times. The volume of games leaves each team with one roughly every other day, with some back-to-backs thrown in. One of the main symptoms of this fast-paced, varied schedule is that NBA teams have little time to prepare for any one opponent. As NBA legend Kevin McHale puts it, “If you play a team on a back end of a back-to-back, you have a morning breakfast meeting, a walk-through, then you have about 15 minutes before the game to talk.” Facing opponents in rapid succession, all with different strengths and weaknesses, makes it difficult for teams to game plan for any particular opponent.

On the other hand, the more focused structure of the playoffs, which sees teams locked in four rounds of best-of-seven series, gives NBA teams much more time to focus on their opponents. As The Athletic’s senior writer Sam Amick notes, “Adjustments are a season-long part of the job description. But the playoff dynamic is far different from the regular season because of one obvious reality: The two teams in each series are locked in a hoops cage match of sorts. With the same coaches and players battling for weeks, the moves and counters take on more significance.”

That idea is backed up in our data as well: coaches that are adept at adjusting to the opponent are among the greatest maximizers of their teams in the playoffs by our RWOE metric. 

The top three current coaches in RWOE, Erik Spoelstra (8), Steve Kerr (4), and Tyronn Lue (4), are some of the most well-respected tacticians in today's NBA. In a 2022 poll of all NBA GMs, Lue was selected as the coach best at in-game adjustments, with Spoelstra right behind in second. While Kerr was absent from that list, he is responsible for one of the most consequential mid-series adjustments in NBA history, the Golden State Warriors’ “Death Lineup,” in which Kerr inserted Andre Iguodala into the starting lineup for Andrew Bogut to turn a 2-1 Finals deficit into the Warriors’ first championship.

The Warriors’ Death Lineup in 2015.

Kerr, Lue, and Spoelstra show us that coaches who are able and willing to make adjustments are the ones you want in the postseason. When teams get familiar with each other, they begin to target the other's strengths and weaknesses. The coach you want in the playoffs is the one able to handle the adjustments from the other side, all while drawing up devastating tactics of their own.

Spoelstra and “Heat Culture”

Through the lens of how coaching changes in the playoffs, the Heat’s upset over the Bucks this year now doesn’t seem so crazy. What was on the surface an eight-seed versus a one-seed was actually a team playing a very one-trick offense centered around Giannis, facing an extremely adaptable Heat team with Spoelstra pulling the strings.

Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra, the league leader in RWOE.

“Heat Culture” has become an NBA buzzword as people try to understand how Spoelstra has pulled this Miami team that barely made the playoffs to the Finals. People suggest it's based on all sorts of things: player development, a next-man-up mentality, and even a mysterious “Pat Riley Effect.” I’ll argue that there is another piece: what Riley and Spoelstra have created in Miami is a roster full of adaptable players in a highly flexible system. They provide the palette for Spoelstra’s game-planning masterpieces, each one further proof that it’s the adjusters you want on your sideline come playoff time.

Stats via basketball-reference.com and nba.com

Edited excellently (and patiently) by Greta Gruber