The 25 best NBA coaches of all time

During his 12-year playing career in the NBA, Jackson was a decent role player. Where he really excelled was as a coach. If you pick any random season of his career, it's a mathematical probability that he led his team to a championship that year: "The Zen Master" coached for 20 seasons, made the Finals in 13 of those years, and won the title 11 times with the Bulls and Lakers.

Auerbach is right behind Jackson in his championship conversion rate: He also coached for 20 years and won nine championships, including eight consecutive titles at the end of his career with the Celtics. Boston's dynasty in the '60s was iconic, and Red was the architect. Even after leaving the sidelines, Auerbach further contributed to the team's success as an executive.

No coach has been as consistently successful for as long a period as Popovich. From the 1998 to 2017 seasons, his Spurs never had a season where they won fewer than 60 percent of their games. Pop's career winning percentage over 29 seasons sits at just under 63, and he brought five championships to San Antonio during that run.

Riley was the leader of the Lakers' prosperous "Showtime" era in the '80s, making the Finals seven times in eight years and winning four titles. After a short run in New York that saw him lead the Knicks to one Finals appearance, he took over in Miami and established the oft-cited "Heat Culture." Riley added one more championship to his resume in 2006 before hanging up his sideline suits a couple seasons later.

From the 2015 to '17 seasons, the Warriors went an unbelievable 207-39, good for an 84 percent win rate. That included the NBA-record 73-9 season, though Golden State didn't win the title that year. Kerr did claim plenty of championships, though, guiding the Warriors to four titles between 2015 and 2022.

Pistons fans owe a lot to Daly, as he helped deliver back-to-back championships in 1989 and 1990, the franchise's first-ever titles. As the head of the "Bad Boys" Pistons, he fostered a bold, physical, defensive-minded team identity that clearly paid off. During the two championship seasons, Daly's teams had over 59 wins each year.

After a decade of working for the Heat, the team finally gave Spoelstra the reins. Within just a few seasons, he had his Heat regularly contending for championships, winning two consecutive in 2012 and '13. Even after the LeBron era, Spoelstra kept his teams competitive, often outpacing what others expected, and took the Heat to two more Finals appearances.

People forget that Brown was a great ABA player for a short while in the '60s, enjoying a three-year stretch where he was an All-Star and led the league in assists per game each season. Immediately after retiring, he got into coaching and was even better at that. He coached for over three decades, an achievement in itself, and regularly kept his teams in the mix, most notably when his Pistons won a title in '04.

Holzman picked up a Coach Of The Year trophy in 1970 and it's easy to see why: The Knicks were a 60-win team that won a championship. During his first seven seasons coaching in New York, Holzman's teams had a cumulative 65 percent win rate and they made additional Finals appearances in '72 and '73, winning again in the latter year. While the team slumped in the years after that run, Holzman finished his coaching career with a hair under 700 career wins.

Tomjanovich guided the Rockets to a championship in 1994, but the next season, they were just the sixth seed in the West. Despite that, the team won a bunch of road games in the playoffs and, against all odds, secured another title. Furthermore, he had one of the most memorable quotes ever, in sports or otherwise, after winning the '95 trophy, saying, "Don't ever underestimate the heart of a champion."

Jones had a bunch of experience with winning as a player, claiming eight straight championships as a member of the Celtics in the '50s and '60s. Decades later, he would return to the Boston bench as the coach, winning the 1984 title in his first season running the team. He kept the Celtics competitive all five years coaching them, making four Finals appearances and winning two championships.

Nelson never quite found himself in the right place at the right time, failing to win a championship in over 30 years as a head coach. Despite that he was consistently successful, being honored with the Coach Of The Year award three times over a 10-year span. Nelson is well-remembered for his "Nellie Ball" philosophy, which proved ahead of its time with its emphasis on pace, spacing, and outside shooting.

Wilkens is one of the most successful NBA players who went on to be a top-tier coach: As a player, he was a nine-time All-Star who finished second in MVP voting one year, and as a coach, he did a lot of winning over the course of 30-plus seasons. Wilkens led Seattle to a championship in 1979 and finished his coaching career with over 1,300 regular season wins.

It's tough to lead a team to a championship when your star is just a second-year player, but Fitch did it in 1981. He coached long before and after that, too, getting his first head-coaching gig in the 1971 season before retiring after the 1998 campaign. Fitch had a reputation as being demanding and it clearly paid off, as his two Coach Of The Year awards indicate.

After a strong playing career that saw Doc make an All-Star team, he went on to become one of the NBA's most prominent coaches of the 21st century. Most notably, he managed all the star power on the 2008 Celtics and guided them to a championship. Rivers had headed several other teams since then, usually leading them to successful seasons with at least 50 wins.

Of the handful of coaches who have reached 1,000 career wins, Karl has the fifth-highest winning percentage with just under 59, behind only icons Gregg Popovich, Jerry Sloan, Pat Riley, and Phil Jackson. Of his 1,100-plus regular-season wins, he got the bulk of his '90s victories over seven seasons in Seattle. He's best known, though, for his winningest gig, coaching the consistently-threatening Nuggets teams of the 2000s, winning Coach Of The Year in 2013.

After a decade as an assistant for a few different teams, Carlile got his big chance with Detroit. He posted two 50-win seasons there (and won Coach Of The Year in 2002) before moving on to Indiana and Dallas, the latter gig being the most memorable of his career thus far. In 2011, he coached a championship Mavericks team, and more recently, he and the underdog Pacers surprised the league by reaching the Finals in 2025.

The Blazers haven't been in the Finals since the '90s, and they've only won a single title, back in 1977. It was Ramsay who was at the helm there, and while they didn't repeat the next season, they did have an impressive 58-win year in '78. For his two decades of contributions to the league, the NBA named Ramsay one of its 15 greatest coaches ever in 2022.

For a whopping 16 seasons, Bud worked as an assistant for the Spurs. Finally, he got a chance to be a head coach with the Hawks in the 2010s and he quickly made those teams competitive. The two-time Coach Of The Year is best known, though, for his incredibly successful five years in Milwaukee. Those teams won over 69 percent of their regular-season games, as well as four particularly important playoff games in 2021 when they became NBA champs.

Thibodeau had a similar career trajectory to Budenholzer, waiting years and years as an assistant before becoming a head coach. In that role, Thibs has developed a reputation for extreme preparedness, as well as for playing his stars heavy minutes. It's worked, as he's been named Coach Of The Year twice and made some deep postseason runs.

After an uneventful three-year stint coaching the Bulls, Sloan spent a few years as an assistant in Utah before taking over as head coach from 1989 to 2011. Those '90s Jazz teams famously never got over the hump (thanks largely to Michael Jordan and the Bulls), but they were nonetheless one of the most threatening teams of the era. Sloan won over 60 percent of the games he coached; Among the handful of coaches with over 2,000 games under their belt, that's the best winning percentage behind only Popovich.

After an up-and-down start in Minnesota, Saunders had the Timberwolves competitive during the first half of the 2000s, even reaching the Western Conference Finals in 2004 behind league MVP Kevin Garnett. Immediately after leaving Minnesota, he took over in Detroit, posting 64 wins and another conference finals appearance in his first season.

Brown has done it all in basketball: He briefly played pro ball for the Rochester Colonels in the Eastern Professional Basketball League, he coached for 15 years, and he was a TV commentator from the 1980s until only just retiring in 2025, when he was in his 90s. He's best known for the latter endeavor, but he was quite the coach, too, winning Coach Of The Year in 1978. He stopped coaching in 1987 until returning to the sidelines in 2003, again winning COTY in Memphis in 2004.

D'Antoni was essentially the architect of the type of NBA basketball played today with his "Seven Seconds or Less" teams in Phoenix. Quick ball movement, spacing, and an emphasis on three-point shooting were characteristics of the style, which should sound familiar. D'Antoni was great for a long time, being named Coach Of The Year in 2005 and again in 2017.

One of the newer coaches on this list, Williams got his first head coaching gig in 2011. His biggest success came later when Phoenix hired him for the 2020 season. After an inauspicious campaign marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams turned the team's fortunes around, leading the Suns to a Finals appearance in 2021 and the league's best record in 2022, winning Coach Of The Year in the latter season.