Ranking All 30 NBA Head Coaches Entering the 2026-27 Season

There is no harder group to evaluate in professional basketball than the coaches. It's not a single job. It's a dozen tied together by a title. You're a strategist and a therapist and a human resources manager and a public relations official and a split-second decision-maker all rolled into one, and you almost never get credit for it because most of the job is invisible. For players, the whole job is on display. For coaches, most of it is getting those players ready and keeping them engaged behind closed doors.

As I point out every year, any attempt to rank them is at best an incomplete endeavor and at worst, closer to a futile one. They're all juggling hundreds of decisions we don't get to see, yet we judge them on the few that we do. They're all working with different resources, and they're all kept on increasingly short leashes.

We didn't quite reach the heights of stunning coaching turnover we saw in 2024 and 2025, but in fairness, that's because most of the accomplished coaches had already been fired. Erik Spoelstra and Steve Kerr are the only remaining coaches in the NBA hired before the start of this decade. Only eight sitting head coaches have held their posts for the last four full seasons. The coach is almost always the fall guy when things go wrong. Every coach is either on the hot seat or a bad year away from getting there. It may not be totally fair for us to judge coaching performance, but it's not as though teams tend to judge coaches fairly either.

So what can we judge when it comes to coaches? These are the traits that come to mind:

- Track record. This is obvious. A great coach tends to win a lot of games in the regular season and advance deep into the postseason. - Performance against expectations. Sometimes, a great coach is stricken with a limited roster. Can he make lemonade out of those lemons? Some coaches happen to consistently find themselves with elite talent. What does it say about them if they can't make the most of it? - Points of emphasis. Do your teams take the right kinds of shots? Do they allow the right kinds of shots? Do you have ways of generating turnovers without excessive fouling? Do you balance rebounding and transition on both ends of the floor? Essentially, is your team doing the right things on paper? Are you plucking the low-hanging fruit? - Creativity. Have you found unorthodox uses for under-valued players? Are there things that you do that other coaches don't? Can you draw up a nice out-of-bounds play? - Player development. Do your draft picks pan out? Do you find productive players on the margins? Do players leave your team and get better? Do players leave your team and get worse? - Rotation management. Are you playing the right players? Are you overusing your best players? Are you underusing them? Do you have specific lineup quirks that help or hurt your team consistently? - People management. Again, we are working with very limited information here, but based on what we can see, do your players like you? Do they play hard for you? Are you operating in lockstep with your GM? Are you constantly battling with ownership? Can you manage the politics of your locker room?

There is no set rubric here. There are, however, a few traits I'm choosing to emphasize this year. The first is playoff performance. Every April, we're reminded of how different the regular season and postseasons actually are. A coach consistently winning in January means less to me if he consistently comes up short in April and May. The second is recent performance. The NBA changes quickly and coaches need to be able to adapt with it. If a coach had a particularly shaky year last season, that's going to factor in heavily here. Those are the coaches with the most to prove this season.

Before we begin, I open each list with the same, all-important qualifier: there are far more good coaches than bad ones in the modern NBA Teams are getting better and better at identifying strong candidates, and the correlation between coaching acumen and job security is distressingly inconsistent. Winning in the NBA has much more to do with players than coaches. Most of these coaches could succeed with the right players. Only a few of them actually have them. There is no curve on this list. Most sitting NBA head coaches are good at what they do, but somebody has to populate the lower end of the list. With that in mind, let's start ranking.

30. Doug Christie, Kings

Last season's rank : 29

The NBA has never been more militant about tanking than it was last season. The Indiana Pacers and Utah Jazz were both fined for tanking-related offenses. The rules were changed to discourage tanking after the season. But when the Sacramento Kings were investigated for tanking after a truly puzzling intentional foul against the Golden State Warriors , they successfully pleaded incompetence.

The Kings had no redeeming qualities as a team last season, no small areas of success that at least pointed to what they hoped to be before everything went wrong. They ranked 26th in offense, 28th in defense and 25th in rebounding. They lost both the free-throw and turnover battles. Save a couple of nice developmental wins down the stretch, the Kings spent last season in the toilet watching the coach they fired 21 months ago win the NBA championship. If you're defending Christie, you're applying the incompetence defense to his organization. He works for the Kings, after all. No coaches succeed there. Yet no Kings coach since Reggie Theus in 2009 has overseen a Kings team with a worse record. Even by Kings standards, last year was a disaster.

29. Brian Keefe, Wizards

Last season's rank: 25

You rarely see opposing players criticize coaches, but Bam Adebayo pinned his 83-point game squarely on Keefe. "You should be blaming their head coach," Adebayo said . "Get that first. I was not the one letting me go one-on-one the whole game until I had 70, and then you started to send a double." Few coaches have ever been given less to work with than Keefe, who took over the Washington Wizards on an interim basis in the middle of a tank that is only now just ending. The Wizards seem to have seen enough to at least give him the chance to coach a team that's actually trying. But as was the case with Christie, we just haven't seen any obvious, optimistic signs yet. There's no single thing the Wizards could hang their hat on last season. The onus is on him to prove he deserves the chance to coach this team as it attempts to turn the corner toward winning.

28. Sean Sweeney, Magic

Last season's rank: N/A

Historically, this list opens with the first-time head coaches. It's an acknowledgment of how little we know about what happens behind the scenes for an NBA team. Basketball isn't football. Assistants don't come with easily discernible titles and responsibilities. Sweeney has ascended to his first head coaching job with an excellent reputation around the league. He's been a highly-regarded assistant for five different teams, and the Magic have every reason to believe he will belong far higher on next year's version of this list than he does this year's. Until we see it, the first timers start at the bottom (unless, as is the case this season, there are holdover coaches with enormously disappointing track records).

27. Micah Nori, Trail Blazers

Last season's rank: N/A

Nori, like Sweeney, is a first-time head coach, but he gets the slight nod by virtue of his experience during the 2024 postseason. Chris Finch was obviously still present as the Minnesota Timberwolves reached the Western Conference Finals, but Nori had to take on an expanded, in-game coaching role after Finch tore his patellar tendon in a collision during the first round. That's not the same as being an acting head coach, but it's experience that should prove helpful as Nori takes over the Portland Trail Blazers .

26. Dusty May, Mavericks

Last season's rank: N/A

May gets a slight nod over Nori and Sweeney by virtue of having head-coaching experience, but he remains behind the rest of the pack because that head-coaching experience came at the college level. There just isn't much recent history of coaches making that jump. Brad Stevens was a major success and Billy Donovan is a solid NBA coach, but they both came after more than a decade of college head coaching. The only other coach to make that leap since is John Beilein (who, like May, left Michigan for the NBA). Beilein was a disaster with the Cavs. The Mavericks are taking the long view with this hire. Cooper Flagg is still only a teenager, so May will have time to find his bearings and adjust to the pros. Considering his well-earned reputation as a tactician at the college level, though, the Mavericks have every reason for optimism.

25. Jamahl Mosley, Pelicans

Last season's rank: 16

Mosley is now with the Pelicans, but his time with the Magic shows why he's ranked low on this list. It's not a great sign for a coach when his own franchise player criticizes his team's process. "Teams, a lot of times, adjust at halftime, and I think that's why we struggled a lot in the second half, just cause we don't really adjust to their adjustments," Magic forward Paolo Banchero said in March. Mosley's run with Orlando culminated in blowing a 3-1 series lead against the  Detroit Pistons  in the first round of the 2026 playoffs. In Game 6, Mosley's Magic were held to just 19 total points in the second half. Those offensive woes were far from an adjustment problem. In five seasons at the helm, Mosley never coached an offense that ranked higher than No. 18.

The Magic spent most of their draft capital trying to give him the scoring punch he needed, and he still couldn't muster an above-average offense. His calling card, despite those offensive struggles, had always been defense, but after the Magic fell to around league-average last season, it became clear that was a roster that badly needed a change.

24. Tuomas Iisalo, Grizzlies

Last season's rank: 26

Iisalo's early coaching tenure has been defined by his unorthodox approach to managing the rotation. His preference is to play players in shorter shifts -- ideally four or five minutes at a time -- in order to keep them fresher. It's an interesting concept in an NBA that is growing increasingly obsessed with depth to combat injuries. It has also seemingly irritated key players, as Ja Morant had a very public spat with Iisalo last season and Jaren Jackson Jr . reportedly shared  similar frustrations. They're both gone now.

This season, with a young, rebuilding roster, is the perfect venue to experiment further with this approach. Morant and Jackson were seasoned stars used to a certain approach to keep them in rhythm. Might younger, less accomplished players prove slightly more pliable? We'll see, but whenever a coach tries something new like this, it's on him to prove its viability. It doesn't matter how revolutionary a coach's principles are if he can't get his players to buy into them.

23. David Adelman, Nuggets

Last season's rank: 15

David Adelman runs into some of the same issues that Michael Malone once did: how much credit can a coach, any coach, get for offensive success with Nikola Jokić? Adelman was Denver's de facto offensive coordinator for years, yet having one of the greatest offensive players in NBA history makes dividing player and scheme enormously tricky. Malone lost his job in part because he couldn't fix a leaky defense built around iffy personnel, and Adelman struggled with the same issues and even worse health a year ago. Still, Denver's first-round loss to Minnesota was completely unacceptable. The Nuggets were far from full strength, but the Timberwolves were far thinner. Ayo Dosunmu and Jaden McDaniels ended Denver's season. Failing to prevent that, even with a limited roster, falls on the coaching staff.

22. Jordi Fernandez, Nets

Last season's rank: 14

Fernandez has dealt with some of the same ta

_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/nba-head-coach-rankings-2026-27-season/)._