NBA Head Coaches Who Should Be On the Hot Seat
Forgiveness and patience are foreign concepts in the NBA coaching world, as evidenced by the presence of three head coaches with recent conference finals appearances on our latest list of hot seat occupants.
Monty Williams was two games from winning a title with the Phoenix Suns less than three years ago. He's now in danger of getting canned for a second time since that achievement.
Due to injuries and circumstances beyond their control, two other coaches we'll highlight have had virtually no chance to succeed during their tenures.
Yet here they all are anyway.
The old saying goes "coaches are hired to be fired." Actually, that needs an update. Coaches are hired, we all relentlessly speculate on whether they'll be fired...and then they get fired.
We're covering that middle step here.
Monty Williams, Detroit Pistons
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The Detroit Pistons have $78.5 million reasons not to move on from Monty Williams. But other than the record six-year contract he signed last offseason, there's little reason for them to retain Williams.
Detroit set an NBA record by losing 28 straight games earlier this year, Williams' rotations and starting lineup decisions have drawn questions and scorn from Pistons fans, and it's difficult to identify any young players who've made major strides during his brief tenure. If a coach struggles to handle the relatively basic issue of who should play with whom and also doesn't seem to have a knack for helping youth improve, it's hard to defend his performance.
Williams' time with the New Orleans Pelicans and Phoenix Suns earned him respect around the league, but it's telling that Phoenix let him go after a successful stretch that included a 2021 Finals appearance, a 64-win campaign in 2021-22, and a second-round exit in 2022-23. If stars Kevin Durant and Devin Booker had wanted Williams to stay, it stands to reason that he'd still be in Phoenix.
Williams wasn't exactly set up to succeed in Detroit. General manager Troy Weaver is under even more scrutiny than the coach he hired because the odd mix of veterans and young players he put together never clicked. Even if the real architect of the Pistons' rickety operation is team governor Tom Gores, blame is going to fall on management and coaching because, well...you can't fire team governors.
Williams is probably safest among all of the coaches we'll feature here, but his job security has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with ownership's likely unwillingness to pay someone tens of millions of dollars not to be its head coach for the next half-decade.
Chauncey Billups, Portland Trail Blazers
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Chauncey Billups hasn't exactly been set up to succeed with the Portland Trail Blazers. He got an average of 43.5 games per season from superstar Damian Lillard across his first two years with the club. Portland shelved Lillard and others down the stretch of both of those campaigns to improve its draft position, then dealt Dame away prior to the 2023-24 season to trigger a full-scale rebuild.
Billups' defenders could fairly note that those circumstances make it difficult to evaluate his performance. But he's hardly the first coach to face injuries and organizational pivots. If anything, the lowered stakes that came with those late-season shutdowns and this year's rebuild should have at least offered clues about how Billups might fare as a developer of young talent.
Quietly, Billups is approaching the dreaded lame-duck season. He's under guaranteed contract for 2024-25, but Portland has a team option for 2025-26 that essentially makes his deal an expiring one.
If the Blazers don't want to risk the 2024-25 roster tuning out a coach whom it knows won't be around for the long haul, they could make a move sooner than later. With that said, Portland might not want to keep two head coaches' salaries on the books for what should probably be another lottery team next season.
Ultimately, Billups hasn't done anything egregiously bad from a tactical or motivational standpoint. But it's also hard to point to anything he's done particularly well.
If anything's going to save his job, it might be Billups' acceptance of overt tanking late in 2021-22 and 2022-23. He proved himself to be a company man during difficult times, and ownership should appreciate that.
Darvin Ham, Los Angeles Lakers
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Frank Vogel won a championship with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2020 and was out of a job less than two years later. That should concern current head coach Darvin Ham, who's had significantly less success than his predecessor and is already dealing with more questions about his effectiveness than Vogel did at this same early stage of his tenure.
Ham got the endorsement of team governor Jeanie Buss earlier this year, but that came on the heels of a report from The Athletic's Jovan Buha and Shams Charania in which no fewer than six sources said there was "a deepening disconnect" between him and the Lakers locker room.
Buha and Charania noted the "disjointedness" between coach and team owed to inconsistencies in lineups and playing time, an issue that has a high success rate of frustrating players. It's not necessarily Ham's fault that L.A. has two stars and a roster otherwise populated with one-way contributors who probably should see their minutes fluctuate based on night-to-night matchups, but fairness has never been much of a factor in situations like these.
Hanging over all of this is the championship-or-bust urgency that comes with coaching a team headlined by LeBron James. The league's all-time leading scorer is still playing at an All-NBA level less than a year shy of his 40th birthday, which means every second the Lakers spend outside the contender class is a second wasted.
The Lakers made it to the Western Conference Finals last season, which might earn Ham a little grace. But they're on track to be a play-in team for the second straight year, which has to count as a disappointment.
James is more powerful than any figure in the organization, and if he isn't satisfied by Ham's performance, there's little doubt about who'll stay and who'll go.
Jason Kidd, Dallas Mavericks
4 of 5
Jason Kidd's .553 winning percentage with the Dallas Mavericks is better than it was at his two previous head coaching stops in Brooklyn and Milwaukee. However, that still probably isn't a high enough success rate to secure his job.
Dallas improbably reached the Western Conference Finals in 2022, but it slipped all the way out of the playoffs last year. Now, struggling to climb out of the play-in section of the West standings, the Mavs aren't exactly making the most of Luka Dončić's early prime. Dallas' 3-3 mark during Dončić's record-setting streak of six straight 30-point triple-doubles shows just how much potential is being wasted on Kidd's watch.
The defense, theoretically a strong suit of Kidd's, has been particularly bad. Dallas ranks 20th in defensive rating on the year and dead last since the middle of February.
As is always the case, the underwhelming performance of Kidd's team isn't entirely his fault. But here's the reality: The Mavericks have a generational star and seem further from contention now than they were in Kidd's first season. With new ownership taking over from Mark Cuban and Dončić's patience falling something short of infinite, the two key drivers of coaching change—potentially disgruntled stars and new voices in charge—are both working against Kidd.
If Dallas goes on a deep playoff run, perhaps Kidd's seat will cool off. And if Dončić voices strong support for him, it'd be almost impossible to imagine this new ownership group (or any other) going against the wishes of the most important figure in the franchise.
Neither of those saving-grace options seem all that likely, though. That means Kidd's tenure in Dallas, which is in its third year, may not match the four seasons he spent with the Bucks.
Steve Clifford, Charlotte Hornets
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Steve Clifford is in his second stint with the Charlotte Hornets, but he wasn't the team's first choice. Back in 2022, before Charlotte brought Clifford back (he also coached the team from 2013-2018), it offered the position to Golden State Warriors assistant Kenny Atkinson. Atkinson accepted, had a change of heart days later and Clifford wound up getting the gig.
Clifford has done an admirable job under difficult circumstances. Star point guard LaMelo Ball played only 36 games in 2022-23 and won't hit that total this season because of an ankle injury. The Hornets also dealt with Gordon Hayward's persistent durability issues and some ugly draft misses.
In addition, they lost Miles Bridges from the lineup for over a year while he faced domestic violence allegations, a case in which he eventually pleaded no-contest to a felony domestic violence charge.
It's a testament to Clifford that he coaxed stretches of committed defense out of this group, and that young players like Brandon Miller and Mark Williams clearly developed on his watch.
Maybe Clifford's modest successes in a tough spot will help keep him around. It's certainly encouraging that new executive vice president of basketball operations Jeff Peterson has worked with him before and had only good things to say in his introductory press conference. However, Peterson will likely do the same thing most freshly empowered execs do: make his own hire at head coach.
Clifford has a team option for 2024-25, which means it's still technically possible he'll return. Maybe he'll get the same "advisory role" shift that former general manager Mitch Kupchak got, which sounds better than being fired or having an option declined.
Fair or not, Clifford seems like he's not long for the Hornets job.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Accurate entering games Monday, March 9. Salary info via Spotrac.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@gt_hughes), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.
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