In terms of the consistency, depth and height of coaching achievements, it’s very hard to put Dean Edwards Smith above John Wooden or Mike Krzyzewski on any all-time list in college basketball. Wooden’s championships and Coach K’s combination of national titles with Final Four appearances would almost certainly place them above Smith — maybe not by huge margins, but by margins clear enough to be seen and appreciated.
However, if there’s one realm in which Smith’s legacy clearly does surpass that of Wooden and Coach K, it’s the strength of his coaching tree.
Wooden’s one protege who made it big in college basketball is Louisville icon Denny Crum, the author of six Final Four appearances and two national titles in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Other than Crum, though, Wooden did not create another particularly distinguished future head coach.
Coach K’s tree has a lot of thin branches at this point. Steve Wojciechowski is just getting started at Marquette, and Chris Collins is trying to get Northwestern off the ground, but longer-term veterans such as Tommy Amaker and Mike Brey have never made a single Elite Eight. They’re solid coaches, but no one touched by greatness has yet to emerge from the Krzyzewski nest.
Rick Pitino is an example of a coach who has given rise to an impressive and extensive coaching tree, as documented here by Dana O’Neil of ESPN. Yet, if you tried to identify a college basketball coach from the latter half of the 20th century who taught five former players or assistants better than Dean Smith did, you’d have a hard task on your hands. The five strongest branches of Dean Smith’s coaching tree can certainly carry the weight of the late coach’s basketball legacy.
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5 – BILLY CUNNINGHAM
Just realize this: The weakest branch among Dean Smith’s coaching all-stars is a man who reached three NBA Finals and won one of them. This is Cunningham’s record in just under a full decade with the Philadelphia 76ers.
Cunningham’s ability to get his team to beat the Boston Celtics in the 1982 Eastern Conference Finals — after suffering a gut-punch loss in the 1981 East Finals — might be his most impressive coaching achievement. In 1983, the arrival of Moses Malone made the Sixers the league’s unquestioned juggernaut. Cunningham got out of the way and allowed his players to do their thing, an underappreciated coaching virtue.
The reason why Cunningham isn’t higher on this list is that his performance in the 1980 Finals — against a rookie-year Magic Johnson — didn’t give his team what it needed. It remains shocking not that the Sixers lost that series in six games, but that they went away meekly in Game 6 on their home floor at The Spectrum. The loss conjured vivid memories of a similar Sixer setback in the 1977 Finals against Portland.
4 – DOUG MOE
There’s an especially fascinating component which belongs to the Dean Smith coaching tree’s five strongest branches: Three of the five branches were former Philadelphia 76er or Denver Nugget head coaches. Moe coached one truncated, throwaway season with the Sixers, making those facts possible.
No one remembers that one truncated season in Philadelphia, though. Moe took both the San Antonio Spurs and the Denver Nuggets to the conference final round in the NBA. Getting the Nuggets past the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s was a big ask for Moe. It’s hard to see how he could have done more than what he did in Denver. His work with that franchise is on par with… another member of this coaching tree, whom you’ll read about shortly.
In retrospect, Moe’s best chance to make the NBA Finals came with San Antonio in 1978 and 1979… partly because Cunningham’s 76ers wobbled in the playoffs. Dick Motta’s Washington Bullets teams beat Moe’s Spurs to the punch in the 1978 and 1979 playoffs, however, seizing the opportunity Moe couldn’t quite capture.
Moe could easily be pigeonholed as the guy who casually rolled the ball on the court and let Alex English and Dan Issel score a billion points in Denver, but as is the case with another member of Dean Smith’s coaching tree, a studied awareness of how his team was best equipped to play informed Moe’s methods. He was a lot more astute than his team’s outward playing style — or his anything-but-polished sideline appearance — suggested.
Moe is definitely a classic example of a “don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover” coach.
3 – GEORGE KARL
The debate between Karl and Moe for third place on this list is not a clear-cut one. Karl’s resume suffers because he got past the first round only once as head coach of the Denver Nuggets. He certainly should have been able to win a few more series in the Rocky Mountains, and it’s this first-round fatigue with Karl which pushed him out the door, leading the Nuggets to want a fresh start. (That decision is being questioned in light of the spectacular failure of the soon-to-end Brian Shaw era, but it was indeed a primary reason for Karl’s exit.)
Yet, Karl probably rates as an ever-so-slightly better coach than Moe because he developed a track record — not unlike the top choice on this list — for fixing teams once he got his hands on them. Karl promptly improved the Golden State Warriors, Seattle Supersonics, and Milwaukee Bucks. He eventually got the Nuggets to the Western Conference Finals, something two other members of this list had done in previous decades. It’s this ability to succeed with so many different franchises which gives Karl’s resume some dimensions Moe’s resume lacks.
Karl is a good-enough coach that if he had been given the keys to the Oklahoma City Thunder next season (that’s the job he should have held out for, of course), the Thunder would have become more of an NBA title contender, not less. He’s really quite good… but he has apparently decided to take over the Sacramento Kings. That move just doesn’t make sense, but it’s Karl’s choice, not ours.
2 – ROY WILLIAMS
This is the other Smith protege who — like Doug Moe with the 1980s Nuggets — is easily accused of just rolling out the ball and winning games because of his players. Sure, it’s a Dean Smith trademark — a not-even-inaccurate one — to say that players win games for coaches. However, Williams has been more than just the beneficiary of great talent.
In the high-turnover world of college basketball — we’re referring to frequent roster changes, not giveaways that lead to baskets for opposing teams — it’s hard to be relentlessly great on an annual basis. Yet, that’s what Williams has largely been in his career. Interestingly enough, only in these past few seasons has “Daggum Roy” failed to maintain North Carolina as a next-level program. Similarly, he encountered one three-season rut at Kansas, from 1999 through 2001.
Otherwise, the man has presided over very few hiccups in his career as far as sustained excellence is concerned.
Williams quickly found his footing at Kansas and won nine conference titles there in 14 postseason-eligible seasons. He’s won or shared the ACC regular season championship in a majority of his 11 seasons in Chapel Hill. His seven Final Fours place him in a tie for fourth on the all-time list (with Rick Pitino), behind only John Wooden, Coach K, and this Dean Smith guy we’re remembering here at The Student Section.
If you want to say that Williams should have made more Final Fours than he has, you might have a point. The 1995 and 1997 Kansas teams had no business falling short of the Final Four — the 1995 team because the Midwest Regionals were in Kemper Arena that season, the 1997 team because it was ridiculously stacked and going up against a very young Arizona team on that Friday night in Birmingham.
However… if you want to play that game, Williams made three Final Fours from an underdog’s position. In 1991, 1993 and 2003, Williams upended a top-seeded opponent in a regional final (Arkansas, Indiana and Arizona) to make the Final Four. The scales even out when trying to diminish Williams’s resume. The attempt doesn’t hold up under further scrutiny.
Want to know how hard it is to make Final Fours? Bill Self has been even more successful at Kansas than Williams within the context of regular seasons. Yet, Self has reached “only” two. His track record is very similar to Williams’s over the course of the first 11 seasons in Lawrence, with the difference being that Self really hasn’t experienced a bad season yet. (At a place such as Kansas, the 1999 and 2000 seasons would qualify as unacceptable.)
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1 – LARRY BROWN
The Philadelphia 76er and Denver Nugget tie-ins involving multiple coaches on this list are quite uncanny. It’s kind of amazing to think that from 1978 through 1980, at least one of the coaches on this list made an NBA conference final. Billy Cunningham, Doug Moe, and Larry Brown all found NBA glory teasingly close to their grasp during those seasons.
Cunningham, of course, won an NBA title in 1983, but as mentioned above, he won with a juggernaut. George Karl made an NBA Finals series, and would have won if he had played any team other than the 1996 Chicago Bulls, led by the best player Dean Smith ever coached, Michael Jordan.
Larry Brown is the strongest branch of Dean Smith’s coaching tree not only because of the vast scope of his accomplishments, but because he won an NBA title with a team molded in Smith’s “Carolina Way,” the antithesis of a superstar collection such as the 1983 Sixers (who played a team game, yes, but with awesome individual talents).
The Detroit Pistons’ clinical dissection of the 2004 “rent-a-superstar” Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals is — and will long be seen as — a shining tribute to Dean Smith, an example of how the team game will overcome a collection of individuals playing separately. Those Lakers had Shaq, Kobe, Karl Malone, and Gary Payton… and they were no match for Chauncey Billups, Ben Wallace, Sheed, Rip Hamilton, and Tayshaun Prince. Good players beat historically great players with the integrated basketball Larry Brown has been able to instill in so many players over the decades.
Say what you want about Brown’s nomadic ways or his propensity to clash with management at just about every NBA stop. He was comfortably uncomfortable, a person who liked being unhappy. (That seems less so right now at SMU, as Brown has mellowed considerably.) Yet, that’s personality-based window dressing. Strictly in terms of coaching chops, Brown’s accomplishments boggle the mind.
Brown has managed to win college and NBA titles. He’s taken two schools to a Final Four and could lead a third school to the NCAA tournament if SMU gets in this season. He’s led teams to the college basketball national title game, the NBA Finals, and the ABA Finals (with the Denver Nuggets before the merger with the NBA). He’s led two separate franchises to the NBA Finals and would have made it three had his 1994 Indiana Pacers not blown a 12-point fourth-quarter lead to the New York Knicks in Game 7 of that year’s Eastern Conference Finals.
Brown led the early-1990s Los Angeles Clippers to consecutive playoff appearances, which felt like an act of God at the time. Had he won the NIT championship game last spring, he would have been able to claim an NBA-NCAA-NIT trifecta in his trophy case. He is and has been a perfectionist whose results show that players benefit from listening to him. If Brown’s career has in any way fallen short, it’s only because Brown lacked Dean Smith’s gentler touch. Yet, that’s nitpicking when matched against his collection of staggering achievements.
