DENVER (KDVR) — It makes very little difference how well the team performs – National Basketball Association fans have mainly negative views of coaches.
Sports Gambling site Betway combed through millions of tweets to see which NBA coach is the most loved – or the least hated, at least.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, negative opinions online are far more common than positive ones. The league’s most loved coach is the Indiana Pacers’ Rick Carlisle, about whom 30.9% of tweets were positive – meaning over two-thirds were negative for even the most popular coach in the league. However, this comparatively positive assessment comes with a caveat – Carlisle only had 2,421 tweets about him in the past 12 months, the lowest amount of any coach in the comparison.
Apparently, a winning record makes little difference in the public’s perception of the coach.
The Denver Nuggets could be headed to the NBA Finals for the first time if they win Game 4 on Monday night against the Los Angeles Lakers. Still, coach Michael Malone is one of the league’s least-liked coaches, with only 12.7% of online conversations about him positive – the sixth lowest.
The same trend happens across the league.
The Indiana Pacers have the NBA’s sixth-lowest win percentage, but still the team’s coach is the most liked. Conversely, the Philadelphia 76ers have the second-highest win percentage in the league but the second-lowest positivity score for coach Doc Rivers.
Malone had more than 51,000 tweets about him, far more than Carlisle but well below the one-million-plus tweets about Steve Kerr.
Nick Nurse of the Toronto Raptors, Mike Budenholzer of the Milwaukee Bucks and Dwane Casey of the Detroit Pistons were all left off the rankings because as of early May they had either been fired or stepped down from the teams they’d coached this season.
