It Begs The Question Is It Coaching What Makes A Great Team Or Is It The Personal?

Most of the time it’s both. A symbiotic relationship between players and coaching that improves the teams and the players over their time together. However it is my belief that coaching plays the biggest role in the success of players and their teams. I’ve had many disagreeable conversation over the topic of Phil Jackson being one of the all time greatest coaches in history. Friends will always argue that he had Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and then Kobe and Shaq. Sure he was fortunate enough to be able to coach some of the best players in NBA history. But he also had the burden of coaching the best players in history. These men knew they were great and had personalities to match. Coach Wooden won championships for 10 straight years with a revolving cast of characters. Coaches have to find ways to best work with these personalities so the can cohabitate and win together.

Everything, be it sport, business, parenting, everything transcends from the top down. If you have a parent with poor eating habits and a lethargic lifestyle most likely their children will adopt that lifestyle. If you have a you have a CEO who is passionate and driven most likely those their employees will be passionate and driven too. And if you have a coach who loves the game, is a student of the game, expects the best from themselves and from his team. Who competes at the highest level day in and day out and knows how to work with the personalities of the team. Then you have a successful formula.

Personnel plays a massive role as well. I would be discrediting every championship player, every employee, every child, pretty much everyone who has ever contributed anything. I’d be discrediting all of them, if I did not acknowledge that their is no team, no successful business, nothing, without the personnel. They are essential in every possible way. Cleveland Cavaliers and their personnel have had a championship caliber team since Lebron James stepped foot in that arena some 15 years ago. This is the first season a Lebron lead time has really struggled to get the pieces to fit together. This season started poorly for them, when someone up top made the decision to trade away one of their best players. Not only one of the best players in Cleveland, one of the best players in the league. And they traded him in spite of having a year left on his contract. Then chose to bring in a bunch of big names who have had great careers in the past but their time and abilities have been waning. Coach Lue and the best player in the league, Lebron James, who you could argue is a player coach himself. Just couldn’t get the team to mesh well and produce results consistently.

So what did they do. They did what everyone should do when atrophy sets in and we begin to experience catastrophic failure. We remove it, we do as nature does, when a virus infects an organism. Isolate it and you either cut off the infection, kill it off, do whatever you have to do to protect the overall health of system. If you don’t, both could go down. This is simply an analogy as to what you should do when you reach terminal failure in business or in life. I’m not saying that the players were an infection. They just didn’t fit into that system. So Cleveland was smart about it and they traded out about half the team that were under performing and brought in new personal to try to help them get better. And I believe it’s the right move, because when it all boils down to it, a team is simply made up of good personnel lead by great coaching.



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