NBA All-Star weekend has officially come and gone from Atlanta and play has resumed across the league, which means this is a perfect time for another edition of the NBA mailbag.
Throughout the season, I will be answering your questions about the latest, most interesting topics in basketball. You can tweet me directly at @kpelton, tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
This week's edition of NBA mailbag includes:
Addressing the motivations and concerns from former players in considering whether to go down the pathway of becoming an assistant coach or a head coach in the NBA.
Debating a possible All-Star game tweak inspired by tourney play in the Philippines. Can you say "passerelle"? Also, is it time for the league to reconsider expanding the All-Star game rosters to 13? 15?
Breaking down the idea of the league switching to players shooting just one free throw instead of two for all possible late-game situations at the line. The G League is currently experimenting with the rule, should the NBA follow suit?
Let the answering of questions begin.
"I enjoyed your article on the NBA's trend away from hiring former players as head coaches. I'm interested in your thoughts around motivation for former players to coach. Prior to the escalation of player salaries, there were former players that financially needed jobs post-playing and coaching was a natural next step.
"Top current players may be considered top potential NBA coaches, but successful current players are paid at such a higher level that it is likely to eliminate their drive to put in the hours as an assistant coach or equivalent trying to get that head coaching job when they don't need the money and the grind to get there is very difficult."
-- Marc
This theory came up in conversations with people around the league when I first mentioned my interest in exploring the change in the value of playing experience on the sidelines. I don't think it explains that the percentage of head coaches who played in the NBA is at its lowest point since the NBA-ABA merger in 1976, but first an interesting stat that didn't make the piece: Of all the head coaches in the NBA in either 2018-19 or 2019-20, there was a combined one All-Star appearance as a player, by Doc Rivers. At the league's high point of former players as coaches, in 2001-02, there were 13 different former All-Stars walking the sidelines who had combined for 60 appearances.
The first reason I don't think lack of interest in coaching is the primary issue is a stat I mentioned in the piece: There are more former NBA players serving as assistant coaches now than there were two decades ago. It's just that the increase is surpassed by the enormous jump in the number of assistant coaches who did not play in the league.
Second, there are examples of even some of the league's highest-paid former All-Stars working their way up the assistant ranks without breaking through as head coaches. The most famous one is Patrick Ewing, who paid his dues as an assistant coach for 15 seasons, working for Jeff and Stan Van Gundy (in Houston and Orlando, respectively) and former Van Gundy assistant Steve Clifford (in Charlotte).
Both Van Gundys were typically outspoken in their belief that Ewing deserved an opportunity to lead his own team, but after being bypassed repeatedly, he ultimately chose to return to his alma mater (Georgetown) as head coach.
Similar stories can be told about two other NCAA head coaches, one-time All-Star Juwan Howard (Michigan) and two-time All-Star Jerry Stackhouse (Vanderbilt). Per Spotrac, Howard's $149 million career earnings rank 60th in NBA history, while Stackhouse earned $84 million in his career. Yet Stackhouse's resumé includes a championship and coach of the year honors in the G League, more typical of a non-player.
Neither Howard nor Stackhouse spent as long as assistants in the NBA before heading to college, so they weren't necessarily overlooked in the same way as Ewing, but all three cases seem to reflect college basketball valuing NBA-player pedigree more than the NBA.
We did add a second highly paid former All-Star as a head coach this season in Steve Nash ($145 million career earnings, 64th) and could soon have another in rising LA Clippers assistant coach Chauncey Billups ($107 million).
Both Billups and Nash are good examples of coaches who had plenty of post-playing options -- Nash both as GM of the Canada Basketball men's senior national team and outside basketball with his production company, Billups as an analyst at ESPN -- and still chose coaching because of their passion for it. If the demand is there for former players as head coaches, I'm confident the supply will be too.
"I think one way of improving the All-Star game is to do it in "passerelle" format. We have tournaments here in the Philippines using this, often at the youth level. Each team is composed of 15 players. Games start with the starting five. The next two quarters will be played by different sets of 5 reserves. Fourth quarter will be open depending on who the coaches want to play. It addresses two things: 1. All players get extended time. 2. Fewer All-Star snubs."
-- Joseph
I'm intrigued. This format fits in well with the other changes the NBA introduced in conjunction with the Elam ending "target score" in 2020 in which the first three quarters are scored individually and the teams are playing for a $100,000 donation to their designated community nonprofit organization each quarter. That's a bit more fun if it's different players each quarter.
I do wonder if the NBA would worry that fans might tune in and out of the broadcast more frequently if they knew ahead of time when each group of stars would be playing (or not). I also think it's important to note that while I'm in favor of expanding the rosters -- it's no longer logical to have 12 players on each All-Star roster when active rosters long ago expanded to 13, and this year are up to 15 in a change I suspect might continue beyond current pandemic conditions -- it's unlikely to help the sentiment that players are "snubbed."
The breakdown of NBA talent is like the extreme right tail of a normal distribution, meaning there are few of the very best players and more average ones. The gaps between the 15th- and 18th-best players eligible in each conference are therefore surely smaller than the gaps between the 12th- and 15th-best players, which are already hair-splitting at best. So even more players will seem deserving if we expand All-Star rosters, increasing rather than decreasing the number of perceived "snubs."
"Do you know whether the G League's experiment has had an adverse impact on FT% for players? I remember doing some research a while back and there was a non-negligible difference in FT% between first and second shots."
-- Matt
This question is asking about the G League's "experimental" rule in which, outside the last two minutes of play, players shoot one free throw for all the possible points -- two points on a non-shooting foul in the bonus, three on a foul in the act of shooting at 3-pointer, etc. When the league first enacted the rule, I wrote in a mailbag that it would inevitably decrease free throw percentages because of players' tendency to shoot better on the second attempt than the first. How has that played out in practice?
Leaguewide, free throw percentage dropped from 74.7% in 2018-19 -- the season before the rule change -- to 72.5% in 2019-20 but rebounded to 74.5% during the G League's 2020-21 bubble campaign. Individually, among players with at least 50 free throw attempts in both 2018-19 and 2019-20, the drop was more modest: 73.8% to 72.8%, with a bit more than half of those players (57%) seeing their percentages decline.
Before you ask: Yes, it does seem like players shot free throws more accurately because of the bubble. If you weight by free throws attempted, we would have expected returning G League players from 2019-20 to make 72.8% of their free throws in the bubble. Instead, they actually shot 75.3%. We saw a smaller version of the same effect in the NBA's bubble games as players shot 79.1% at the foul line, up from 77.9% based on the same weighted number of attempts prior to the stoppage of play in 2019-20.
However, as I noted in a past mailbag, the bubble effect did not carry over to shots during the course of play. We would have expected returning G League players to make 35.1% of their 3-point attempts, and instead this group shot just 33.8%.