Steve Nash has the hottest seat of any NBA coach
Ime Udoka proved that the regular season doesn't have to begin for an NBA team to change coaches. According to the Washington Post's Ben Golliver, two other Atlantic Division coaches have the most tenuous holds on their jobs: Brooklyn's Steve Nash, and the Philadelphia 76ers' Doc Rivers.
Nash is the most obvious one, since his best player, Kevin Durant, demanded that Nets owner Joe Tsai choose between him and the duo of Nash and GM Sean Marks. Tsai refused to give into KD's demands, but Nash begins the season with very little slack.
The injury-plagued Nets finished seventh in the East last season, and got swept in the first round. And that was with three superstars — or two-and-a-half, if you consider Kyrie Irving couldn't play home games because he was unvaccinated. Now, they've swapped James Harden for Ben Simmons, who is coming off back surgery and hasn't played an NBA game in 15 months. The team brought in reinforcements — Royce O'Neale, T.J. Warren, Markieff Morris — but they better gel quickly. Owners paying over $100 million in luxury tax don't tend to be patient with their coaches.
Doc Rivers also oversaw an underachieving Philadelphia 76ers team that lost to the Miami Heat in the second round. It's the second-straight year the Sixers have fallen short of the conference finals with Doc, even with MVP runner-up Joel Embiid, and it's the team's fourth second-round exit in five years. For a coach who has over 1,000 regular season wins, Rivers struggles in the playoffs. He's lost three series where his team had a 3-1 lead, and his teams are especially bad in closeout games.
(He won a closeout game two days after this embedded tweet to improve his record to 7-16)
Anything short of the conference finals this season is a huge disappointment. If the team starts slowly, team president Daryl Morey might move quickly. After all, Morey's former coach from Houston, Mike D'Antoni, is still available.
The Atlanta Hawks took a step back last season, so coach Nate McMillan isn't safe either. Atlanta shook up the team and brought in All-Star Dejounte Murray to shore up what was one of the league's worst defenses. A bad start could mean McMillan gets canned. After all, replacing former coach Lloyd Pierce with McMillan helped propel the Hawks to the conference finals in 2020-21. General manager Travis Schlenk won't hesitate to make a similar move.
In the West, many of the coaches are too new, or the teams are planning to tank too hard, for most jobs to be in real danger. But one name to watch is Chauncey Billups of the Portland Trail Blazers. His hiring last year drew backlash immediately, and when the season started, Damian Lillard's abdominal injury led the Blazers to sell off players and embrace the tank. Lillard is back, and the team is trying to contend, bringing in Jerami Grant and Gary Payton II this summer. For a team that might be for sale and a coach that's not beloved by the fan base, changing coaches might be Portland's best option if they're at the fringes of play-in territory mid-season.
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