Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty ImagesYouth and a lack of size are two of the most basic hindrances to NBA success. Mark Daigneault's Coach of the Year case might best be explained by the way he's helped the Oklahoma City Thunder overcome those two team-killing deficiencies.
Talent certainly helps. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is a lock for the All-NBA first team, Jalen Williams is our pick for Most Improved Player, and Chet Holmgren is going to finish second in Rookie of the Year voting. Daigneault deserves credit for positioning those three to be the best versions of themselves.
He has the Thunder playing a spread-out style that supercharges SGA's drives. He primed Williams for a bigger facilitating role than many expected by allowing him to run second units as a point guard. He willingly accepted the rebounding issues that came with playing Holmgren as the lone big in order to get the most offensive value out of the rookie's game.
Beyond his management of OKC's top three players, Daigneault also kept more of the roster engaged by mixing and matching, routinely using at least 10 players per night and tweaking styles to accommodate the revolving door of subs. Oklahoma City will finish the year having allowed 13 players to log at least 10.0 minutes per game.
The Thunder surpassed their October prediction of 44 wins with more than a month left in the season. So we can add "dramatically exceeding expectations" to the list of reasons why Daigneault deserves this award.
Runner-Up: Joe Mazzulla, Boston Celtics
The Celtics added two new starters in Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porziņģis as part of an offseason overhaul that was intriguing on paper but potentially tricky to manage in practice. It's easy to look at the raw top-end talent and assume Boston would have won a ton of games on autopilot, but that diminishes the tactical and cultural questions Mazzulla had to answer.
It wasn't clear Porziņģis would be so valuable against mismatches, but Mazzulla made KP post-ups a staple of Boston's attack. And it can't have been easy to get everyone in the first unit to embrace the sacrifice required for ultimate success. Holiday, for example, is averaging fewer points than he has in any season since 2009-10, but he hasn't issued even a whisper of dissatisfaction.
Al Horford had come off the bench four times in over 1,000 appearances prior to this season, when he logged more than 30 games as a reserve. Jayson Tatum took fewer shots than he had since 2019-20.
Mazzulla pushed all the right buttons, managed egos and got maximum buy-in from all parties involved. And if you want to disregard all that and simply focus on Boston winning more games than anybody else by a wide margin, that's probably enough to justify runner-up status by itself.
Worth a Mention: Jamahl Mosley, Orlando Magic; Tom Thibodeau, New York Knicks; Chris Finch, Minnesota Timberwolves; Ime Udoka, Houston Rockets
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