In 2008, Doc Rivers was on top of the NBA coaching world. He had already won a Coach of the Year in 2000, and now he led the Boston Celtics to its 17th NBA Championship and the team’s first since 1986. Currently, Rivers has taken over the helm in Milwaukee and many people around the league are already calling for his head. The Bucks are 3-7 in the ten games Doc Rivers has coached in, and things are looking rough for a team that was perceived as a guaranteed top two team in the East heading into the season. How can one of the NBA’s 15 Greatest Coaches be performing so poorly? To fully grasp how porous Doc Rivers has been, we must look back to the very beginning of his coaching career.
It’s hard to find a better first-year head coach season than what Doc Rivers had with the Orlando Magic back in 2000. For Orlando, the turn of the century also meant a head coaching turnover. The great Chuck Daly would retire from coaching and Doc Rivers would step in. The interesting part about this move was the Magic in fact got worse upon Rivers’ arrival. In the shortened 1999 season, Daly led the Magic to a 33-17 record and a first round exit. With Penny Hardaway and Darrell Armstrong in the backcourt, the Magic possessed the third-best defense in the entire association and gave up the second-most turnovers. Nevertheless, you bring in Doc Rivers to the mix, and the team was painfully average. The 2000 Magic finished with a 41-41 record, along with the 22nd ranked offense and the 9th ranked defense. To Rivers' credit, the Magic were still predicted to win 43 games even after losing Penny Hardaway, Nick Anderson, and Horace Grant. In actual reality, though, Rivers accomplished little to further the Magic organization's success, and he still managed to defeat Phil Jackson, Paul Silas, Jerry Sloan, and Pat Riley to win Coach of the Year
After four more years of extensive mediocrity, Rivers would eventually be let go from Orlando and hired by the up and coming Boston Celtics featuring Paul Pierce and the reacquired Antoine Walker. The 2005 Celtics would improve their record by nine wins to finish with a 45-37 record. The Celtics would also improve in both offensive and defensive rating, and this was all with Antoine Walker playing 24 games. However, things would go downhill from there with Boston having two straight losing seasons with abysmal play on both sides.
As we all know, things would change in 2008. Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett would join the Celtics in what many credit as the beginning of the super team era. The Celtics would win 66 games with their stifling defense. Getting Kevin Garnett at the peak of his defensive powers certainly helped that metric. Not to mention the ascension of Rajon Rondo and Tony Allen as some of the best defensive guards of their era. Everything fit perfectly, and credit the great Danny Ainge for orchestrating one of the most dominant rosters of the past 20 years. In the midst of the original Big 3's mob, Doc was essentially invisible. Sure, Doc was the man writing up the defensive schemes, but he had perhaps the most perfect roster to maximize the output of said schemes. The major issue that the Celtics had in the latter years of the Big 3 was the offense. After 2009, the Celtics offense continued to fall every season under Doc Rivers before the inevitable destruction of the roster and movement into the rebuilding period. The offensive ranks in Doc’s final four seasons in Boston were 15th, 18th, 27th, and 24th.
Doc would then be relieved of his coaching duties in Boston, and would immediately be acquired by the infancy of the Lob City era Los Angeles Clippers. Not only that, but he would also be given an executive role, a role that would last his first four seasons in the City of Angels. Many would argue that his Clippers era is the peak of Doc’s coaching career, and while that is true it is still about average in the grand scheme of coaching. The Clips offense would be the best in basketball, and would still be the ninth best defense in the league. In reality, this is primarily due to Blake Griffin’s progression into a premier offensive weapon to go along with Chris Paul’s peak as a defender, and DeAndre Jordan ascending to an elite double-double machine with immaculate defense. Compared to the Clippers with Vinny del Negro at the helm the year prior, there was not any improvement at all. In fact, it seems that Rivers potentially held them back. In the postseason, nearly every player on the roster statistically regressed in some way. The defense was carried by Chris Paul and DeAndre Jordan, along with CP3 doing his absolute best to carry the offensive load. Over the rest of Rivers' time in LA, the team regressed and continued to disappoint in the postseason. It was amplified in the Paul George and Kawhi Leonard era where they were nothing more than a regular season team. It was not until Tyronn Lue took over that the Clippers were finally able to break through to the Conference Finals. A feat that Doc was never able to obtain while with the team.
It was more of the same in the city of Brotherly Love. A Doc Rivers team will give you hope in the regular season, just to crumble when it matters most. When you think about the best players that Doc has had since Boston: Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, Paul George, Kawhi Leonard, James Harden, Joel Embiid. All but Kawhi are viewed amongst the majority of NBA fans as a “playoff choker”. I am not saying that they aren’t as there is statistical merit to that claim, but some of that blame needs to be put on Doc Rivers as well for not putting his best players in a scheme for them to succeed in the playoff style of play.
Now here we are, past the trade deadline with the Bucks seemingly in no man’s land desperately trying to fix whatever is going wrong. Over the last ten games, Milwaukee has a 113.3 offensive rating which would tie them at 22nd in the league with the Miami Heat. Compared to the 122 offensive rating under Adrian Griffin, it is night and day. The Bucks defensive rating has been at 115.4 over their last ten, but they have been around this number all season long. It is clear that Doc Rivers has no idea how to run an offense featuring Damian Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo. If you watch the games they don’t even play off of each other. The concept of a Dame and Giannis pick and roll sounds incredible, but they barely even run that play together in games. If you have two of the best offensive players in basketball over the past ten years there is no reason why you shouldn’t be killing it on the offensive side, especially if their playstyles fit so perfectly together.
Ultimately, Doc Rivers has proven to not only me, but other analysts such as JJ Redick, that he is nothing more than a coach that has ridden the coattails of his players. Doc's recent complaints of his hiring have proven that. The Bucks should have never fired Adrian Griffin and now it might be too little too late.