The Los Angeles Lakers fired Head Coach Mike Brown on Friday in response to his team (full of Hall of Famers and All Stars) starting the season 1-4. Expectations were high in LA after the Lakers bulked up their team with Steve Nash and Dwight Howard as their big off-season free agent signings, yet Mike Brown had great difficulty pulling the team together (in fact, the Lakers were also 0-8 in their pre-season games). The result of the team’s poor play? A coach with still 4 years on his contract owed over $10 million dollars is now unemployed.
Did Mike Brown deserve to be fired? Was it his fault the Lakers were under-achieving? On the other hand, when teams do play well — and possibly over-achieve — should the coach receive the bulk of the praise for leading his team? The degree to which a coach (or any leader for that matter) has a direct impact on his team’s mental toughness and overall success is certainly a debatable topic, with some folks feeling coaches get too much credit for team success, while others asserting that coaches receive too much blame when teams under-achieve.
Making things even more interesting in LA is the rumor going around that former Lakers coach Phil Jackson will soon be re-hired. Jackson has been a winner everywhere he’s been, including his previous stints with the Lakers, and the expectation is that if he goes back to LA he will again produce a championship-caliber team. Lets say that Jackson is indeed hired, and that he leads the Lakers to a championship season – can we then say that Mike Brown was a lousy coach and was the primary reason why the Lakers under-achieved this year? There are a few plausible considerations to examine if this is in fact what happens (Jackson coming back and the Lakers winning again):
- Mike Brown was fired too soon (after all, Steve Nash has been out of the lineup with an injury). Had Brown been given more time with the team they would have ended up winning this year.
- Mike Brown was to blame, and the team would have only gotten worse under his leadership
But what if Phil comes back?
Lets say Phil Jackson is re-hired, and assuming no player moves are made he ends up winning with the same players Brown had. In this scenario the only variable that has changed is the coach, leading us to believe that “type of coach” is actually the variable most associated with the change in team success. While this is possible, could the change be due to something deeper than just Phil Jackson’s basketball acumen? Sport psychologists might respond with the following if the Lakers begin winning again:
- Phil is simply better with the “X’s and O’s” than Brown was.
- The Lakers begin winning again because of their belief in Jackson, and their expectations that he will guide them to a championship. In this example, basketball “IQ” and coaching X’s and O’s take a backseat to a leader who leads by building belief and confidence in his players.
- The Lakers play better – but would have anyway had Brown been given more time to get his team playing better.
- Of course, the wild card here is if Jackson is hired and the team continues to play poorly — who would be at fault in this scenario????
The point here is that attributing a cause-effect relationship with anything is tough – and it’s especially tough when you are talking about malleable human beings easily impacted by belief, confidence, fear, anxiety, and a host of other personality traits that impact human performance. Successful coaches are interesting to examine, as it could be argued that their success is due more to their understanding of the science of their sport – but it could also be argued that it is their leadership style that is the real variable responsible for change (meaning they are just really good at getting their players to believe in themselves). Of course, great coaches have both of these things going for them – a strong knowledge of the sport and a leadership style that instills confidence and belief within the team.
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brown, coaches, Coaching, fired, Leadership, mike, phil jackson, psychology, sport, success, team
