NBA star players make winning coaches, study shows, as example of how experts make the best leaders

Star players make better National Basketball Association coaches, according to a study by researchers at Cornell's ILR School and the University of Warwick, England.

Using data from 15,000 basketball games between 1996 and 2004, the study shows that NBA teams tend to win more games if led by coaches who were star players or who had long playing careers. That's in keeping with the common sense view -- across many industries -- that experts in a field make the best leaders.

"Having a former All-Star player as your coach is worth about six extra places in the NBA rankings in team winning percentage," said co-author Larry Kahn, a professor of labor economics and collective bargaining at Cornell's ILR School. "We were surprised at the strength of the statistical evidence."

They found that coaches who never played in the NBA never made the playoffs in the their first year with the team, compared with about half of the teams taken over by a former NBA player, according to the report.

Such former NBA All-Star players as Danny Ainge, Larry Bird, Maurice Cheeks and Jerry Sloan, for example, each had winning percentages better than .600 as NBA head coaches during the period the authors studied.

In the current NBA finals Phil Jackson, head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, is tied with the Boston Celtics' legendary Red Auerbach for the most championships (nine) and has the second-best career regular-season winning percentage (.700) of all time.

Although Jackson was never an NBA All-Star player, he had a long NBA playing career (12 seasons), a mark of distinction as only the best players in the world are invited to play in the NBA. Doc Rivers, current head coach of the Celtics, was an NBA All-Star player who had a 13-year NBA-playing career and led the Celtics to this year's best record in the NBA. The addition of two star players -- Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen -- certainly helped.

Such team performance factors as player quality were controlled in the study.

"Forget charisma. Forget the airport-book stuff," said Amanda Goodall, a management scholar at the University of Warwick Business School and a study co-author with Warwick economist Andrew Oswald; both are visiting fellows at the ILR School. "Our results are consistent with the common sense idea that organizations need to be led by people with deep expert knowledge of the core business."

The researchers speculate that a deeper understanding of basketball gives top-players-turned-coaches a significant edge over other coaches. This may come through better tactics or increased credibility with players, they said.

The authors' work began as an attempt to understand leadership in general. The NBA is a natural laboratory for testing, they said, because of data availability, small-team size and the comparative simplicity of the professional basketball industry.

The authors believe that their results that experts tend to make the best leaders are likely to generalize to many economic and organizational settings.

The report is available at http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/news/061208_NBAplayoff.html.

Mary Catt is a staff writer for the ILR School.

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