What Would It Take for Kevin McHale to Lose His Houston Rockets Job This Year?

Kevin McHale is entering his fourth year as the head coach of the Houston Rockets, and if the team continues to perform as it has under his tenure, it should be his last.

Last spring, the team picked up the final year of his contract. In May, Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle explained why:

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McHale just completed the final guaranteed season of his contract, but multiple individuals with knowledge of the Rockets thinking have said management believes in him and wants him to have more time with a relatively new team that spent the season battling injuries.

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That's hardly a ringing endorsement. It's essentially conceding he failed, but since he didn't fail under perfect circumstances, he gets a chance to fail again. Whether McHale will justify the Rockets' continued faith in him is questionable.

His history with Houston has been anything but inspiring. The team has won, but that’s more in spite of him than because of him. There's nothing to its success that relates to his coaching. 

There are at least three things a coach is expected to do:

1. Form a winning system
2. Get the most out of his players
3. Manage games

Thus far, McHale has proved himself to be deficient in all three areas.

Form a Winning System

Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press

The most important job of a coach is to develop a winning system. Whether you’re talking about Phil Jackson’s triangle offense with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers or the currently successful offense of the San Antonio Spurs under Gregg Popovich, a great coach has a system that can win.

There is a narrative that says that McHale should be able to coach well because of what he did when he was running the court with the Boston Celtics. And it's true that as a player, McHale earned his way to into the Hall of Fame by being one of the best post-up scorers the game has ever seen.

His career spanned from 1980 to 1993. And over that time, teamed with Robert Parish and Larry Bird, he won three NBA championships. 

Theoretically, he should be able to transfer that ability to his team through coaching. However, the numbers throw that theory into doubt. According to mysynergysports.com (subscription only), the Houston Rockets are just 28th in the league on post-up plays. So whatever he did during his younger days hasn't been translated into some sort of effective system. 

During his two previous stints coaching the Minnesota Timberwovles, he posted just a 39-55 record. While he deserves a degree of credit for developing Kevin Garnett during his 14-year tenure there as coach and exec, it was about the only positive thing he did. 

Yes, the Rockets have a successful offense, ranking fourth in offensive rating, per Basketball-Reference.com. But their efficient scoring would appear to have more to do with the philosophies of their general manager, Daryl Morey, than McHale.

Kirk Goldsberry of Grantland explains:

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So far this season, 25 percent of NBA field goal attempts have occurred beyond the 3-point line. As a whole, the league is making 37 percent of its 3s. And despite the dramatic rise in 3-point shooting, many of the game’s premier analytical minds suggest that even today’s rate of 3-point shooting remains too conservative. There is no more prominent member of this camp than Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets and one of the cochairs of the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which gets under way tomorrow in Boston.

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After detailing how mid-range shots are bad because they are less efficient, Goldsberry continues:

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This is exactly what Morey’s D-League team does. The Rio Grande Valley Vipers (profiled by Jason Schwartz on Grantland this week) are the most fascinating ongoing experiment in basketball right now because they have constructed an offensive strategy around shooting only 3s and close-range shots. They shun the midrange as if it were illegal to shoot from there.

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The Rockets are using Rio Grande as a proving ground for their theories, and as Grant Hughes of Bleacher Report explains, Houston is emulating the D-League team:

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On the season, Houston is averaging just 9.3 attempts from the mid-range area per game, according to NBA.com. The 76ers attempt the second most, but at 18.4 mid-range tries per contest, they take nearly twice as many of those low-percentage shots.

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So the Rockets are a highly efficient offense, but that is more because of Morey's engineering than any great coaching philosophies of McHale.

In fact, it’s hard to find something Houston’s offense wouldn’t do just as well if someone else were coaching.

Furthermore, while Houston’s offense is elite, its defense was only the 13th-most efficient. That’s in spite of having All-Defensive players Dwight Howard and Patrick Beverley on the team.

James Harden bore the brunt of the blame for that, and his mental lapses invited it. However, how is a player permitted to have such lapses? That falls on the coach. 

Bruce Bowen recently conveyed his thoughts on Harden’s defense to Dan McCarney of the San Antonio Express News: 

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See, I don’t cringe (watching Harden on defense), because I remember him in OKC. In fairness to James, yes, (his defense) has been terrible, but what are the principles in Houston? I’m very disappointed in their team concept. That’s what I don’t see. So, if there are no rules and regulations, how do you hold anyone accountable? Speaking to James about this, he’ll say it – “I know I have to do a better job.” But without any direction, without a coach saying, hey, we’re going to send this player baseline because that will be our best bet, it’s really tough. Defense is something you have to practice every day, especially rotations. We went over our rotations every day in all my eight years in San Antonio. You would think me, Tim, Tony and Manu all knew what we were supposed to do. But others don’t. They have to become as familiar as we were. That’s why I go back to principles. Go back to OKC and they’re playing the Lakers, he guarded Kobe pretty well. That’s why I say, what’s going on (in Houston) is about something else.

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The Rockets have a successful offense, but that doesn’t have much to do with McHale. Houston’s failures on defense, however, have plenty to do with him. There’s nothing to his system that makes him irreplaceable. In fact, you might say there’s nothing to his system, period.

Get the Most Out of His Players

The next thing a head coach is expected to do is get the most out of his players. Think about guys like Tom Thibodeau who keep winning, even when they lose stars, because they know how how to draw out the talent their players have. Thus, they can exceed expectations. 

So what about the Rockets? Are they overachievers or underachievers under McHale’s regime? I looked at some of the key players and their year-to-year player efficiency rating:

Chandler Parsons improved, but his max PER of 15.9 falls short of his abilities. Kyle Lowry saw his production drop off during his second season in Houston. Then he was dealt to the Toronto Raptors, where he had the best year of his career.

Omer Asik seemed like a perfect candidate for McHale to develop, as Asik's offensive game needed considerable polish. After a successful first year, though, he regressed last season. Sure, some of that is on Howard’s acquisition, as Asik never quite fit with him. But part of coaching is figuring out how to make things work when the situation isn't optimal.

Howard saw a slight uptick after his disastrous year with the Los Angeles Lakers, but his 21.3 PER was still well shy of his career high: 26.1.

Jeremy Lin came off a 19.9 PER and saw it fall in each of his two years with the Rockets. His time with the New York Knicks was an outlier, so the first-year drop is excusable. But the second-year decline is different. If he sees his production go back up with the Los Angeles Lakers, that would point further to McHale's failures.  

The only player with steady improvement under McHale is James Harden, but McHale doesn’t deserve credit for it. Harden changed roles when he came over from the Oklahoma City Thunder, going from sixth man to first option. As a result, his usage went from 20.4 percent during three years in Oklahoma City to 28.4 percent over two seasons with Houston. That shift alone accounts for his PER going up.

McHale has proved insufficient in the second aspect of coaching. You can’t identify one player whose career is better because he's been coached by McHale. 

Game Management

Game management is a tough thing to determine objectively. In theory, though, when the game is on the line it becomes at least partly a chess match. The coach who makes the better in-game adjustments will tend to win games.

If a team is blowing out its competition every night, it's mostly a matter of talent. But when the game comes down to the wire, coaching matters more.

So how does one measure that? I looked at records in "clutch games" at NBA.com/STATS. That means that at some point during the last five minutes of the game, the score was within five points.

I then compared the records for clutch games with non-clutch games. Teams that are winning mostly based on talent should see a wide swing between the two. Teams with better coaching should see little change. 

It’s important to avoid comparing apples and oranges. Relative to their overall records, bad teams will automatically improve more in clutch situations. That’s because bad teams are more likely to get blown out, so the mere fact that they're even competitive on any particular night means they're doing better. 

Therefore, to avoid that conflict I compared only winning teams. Hover over the points in the chart below to see more details. Mouse along the bottom axis to reveal more teams. (You click here for full-screen version):

If the blue line is over the green line, it means the team is actually better in the clutch. Such is the case with the Memphis Grizzlies, Chicago Bulls, Charlotte Bobcats and Indiana Pacers. Other teams, such as the Portland Trail Blazers, Los Angeles Clippers and San Antonio Spurs don’t see much disparity.

When you start considering the coaches of those teams include guys like Popovich, Thibodeau, Doc Rivers and Frank Vogel, it’s apparent: Elite coaches win in the clutch.

McHale, though, is on the other end of the spectrum. The gulf between his non-clutch and clutch winning percentage is the fifth worst in the NBA. He is with other coaches, such as Scott Brooks of the Oklahoma City Thunder, Randy Wittman of the Washington Wizards and Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat, who have been "accused" of just riding superior talent to better records. 

And that makes three strikes for McHale. 

He hasn't been able to establish a particularly effective offensive or defensive system, in spite of being given the tools to do so. He hasn't developed the players he’s received or helped them to realize their full potential. And he hasn't made the right decisions on the bench in late-game situations.

There’s a word for all those things: coaching. And if he doesn’t start doing them this year, look for a job opening next offseason in H-Town. All McHale needs to do to lose his job is keep performing at it this badly. 

All stats for this article were obtained from NBA.com/STATS or Basketball-Reference.com.