Originally Posted by
mkirsh
It's a good question, but in general I believe the perception is that the NBA is the more coveted job. There isn't actually a lot of head coaching movement between leagues, but of the few cases of coaches moving from the NCAA to the NBA (Stevens, Donovan, etc), they are generally poached away from their college job, vs the small handful of NBA coaches moved to the NCAA (Cal, Leonard Hamilton, and Tim Floyd are all I can think of right now) were fired by NBA teams. Said another way, I can't think of a a single example of anyone leaving a stable NBA head coaching job for a college job, but definitely could be missing one. All this to say, I can't see Stevens to Duke, regardless of how much Coach K likes it here.
The top college coaches are in enviable positions. High income, deities on their campus who really (if they behave sensibly) don't have bosses in the conventional sense. The tenure of these top few extend for decades. You know them -- K, Roy, Self, Calipari, Boeheim, (soon to be) Tony Bennett, and Jay Wright. It's not clear there are more than these -- Mark Few maybe, but West Coast Conference is not a big player and Spokane is a long way away from anywhere.
The NBA top coaches also have good deals, but there are many fewer in that top echelon. Part of the problem is the Pat Riley Axiom: "After a few years, the players quit listening to you, and it's time to move on." That's an NBA, not a college, problem. Then there is the "bosses problem" -- GM, team president, owners change from time to time and the new guy or gal may want to make changes. Compare with college -- a new AD or chancellor at KU is not gonna fire Bill Self. In the past 75 years in the NBA, there are only five coaches who have won more than two championships: Phil Jackson, Auerbach, Popovich, Riley and George Mikan's coach John Kundla (yep, I had to look him up). It is really hard to become an established NBA coach -- less so if you go to the right college position.
Now, would I personally leave a relatively secure position at an NBA franchise to return to college. Probably not, but the top college coaching gigs are really good jobs.
Kindly,
Sage
'And I strongly disagree with the notion that Duke is a "4ish" program. Duke is the best known amateur team in the entire world -- thanks to its distinctive branding (there is, despite what Odom says, an advantage in not being named for a state) and chiefly to Coach K as the highly successful Team USA coach'
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013