The Cleveland Cavaliers were right to move on from head coach J.B. Bickerstaff. And the Detroit Pistons were right to hire him.
It's easy to fall into a pattern of evaluating NBA coaches with a binary standard: are they a good coach, or a bad coach? If you have a good coach, you keep him. If you have a bad coach, fire him and hire a good one.
By that logic, the Cavaliers made a colossal mistake firing Bickerstaff. He was head coach in Cleveland for 4.5 seasons, overseeing the painful early seasons of their rebuild but then molding a team that made it as far as the Second Round of the playoffs.
In his final three seasons in Cleveland he won 44, 51 and 48 games respectively (an average of 47.7) and had one of the league's best defenses. Last season an injured Cavaliers team made it to the second round and lost to the future champions. On the surface, Bickerstaff had done nothing to "deserve" to be fired and he certainly appeared to be a "good" coach.
Bickerstaff has been great for the Pistons
Yet fire him the Cavaliers did, setting up the Detroit Pistons to fire their head coach Monty Williams and hire Bickerstaff. He stepped into place for a Detroit team that was coming off of a 14-win season and had not won more than 23 games in six years.
It was assumed that the Pistons would again be bad, perhaps able to climb into the 20s in wins as they continued to rebuild the talent level and instill some professionalism into the franchise.
Yet Bickerstaff has instead led the Pistons to a shockingly strong start. They are 29-26 at the All-Star Break, in sixth-place in the Eastern Conference. If the season ended today they would avoid the Play-In Tournament completely.
Their record is also not a fluke. They have a +0.5 net rating, right in line with their record, good for fifth-best in the East. Simple Rating System (SRS), a metric that factors in strength of schedule, likewise has Detroit fifth in the East. They have earned their spot in the standings.
They have reached this point by modernizing their shot diet, adding and playing shooters around the ascending star that is Cade Cunningham. For years analysts have wondered what Cunningham would look like surrounded by shooters, and while the Pistons continue to draft non-shooters, they have added shooting via trades and free agency to give Cade a spaced floor. He has responded with an All-Star season, the first Pistons All-Star since Blake Griffin in 2018-19.
Perhaps even more impressive is that Bickerstaff has taken a team that ranked 26th in defensive last season and turned them into a Top-10 unit. Young center Jalen Duren has taken a major step forward defensively, Cunningham has been great on that end, and Ausar Thompson has delivered on his athleticism to be a stopper for Detroit.
The Pistons haven't abandoned the youth movement, either. Thompson has been healthy and available for 33 games this season and has started 22 of them. Rookie Ron Holland has appeared in all 55 games this season. Duren is entrenched as a starter at age 21, and 22-year-old Jaden Ivey started all 30 games before he suffered a long-term injury. Veterans Tobias Harris, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Malik Beasley are playing key roles, but in support of young players coming into their own.
What Bickerstaff has done in his first year in Detroit is nothing short of remarkable, bordering even on the miraculous. He took the worst team in the league and made them a legitimate playoff contender. The front office added shooting this summer, giving him the pieces to work with on offense, but he performed the transformation on defense.
That is why Bickerstaff is among the leaders for the NBA Coach of the Year award. Depending on where you look, he is ranked second or third in odds to win the award, a tribute to the job he has done in Detroit.
Bickerstaff elevating a bad team into a very good one is hardly surprising to Cavaliers fans who saw him do it in Cleveland. Neither is the work he has done maximizing the talent, overcoming fit issues and installing a strong defense that is better than the individual components.
With the Cavaliers, Bickerstaff was able to field elite defenses despite two small guards sharing the backcourt, be that Darius Garland and Collin Sexton or Garland and Donovan Mitchell. He not only found a way for two seven-footers to work together in Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen, but he even unlocked a lineup with three of them when Lauri Markkanen was in town.
Nothing that is happening in Detroit is surprising to the Cavaliers and their fans, and it's why it was always such a difficult decision for the organization to move on from him.
So was it a mistake? Did the Cavaliers err in firing a "good" coach?
The Cavaliers made the right decision letting Bickerstaff go
The answer is clearly no, and it's proven out by the coach who is the favorite to win Coach of the Year: Bickerstaff's replacement in Cleveland, Kenny Atkinson.
Atkinson has come in and taken the Cavaliers to another level. They are 44-10, tied for the best record in the league and 5.5 games ahead of the Boston Celtics in the East. They have the league's best offense by far and are shooting the lights out, and have established themselves as a clear inner-circle title contender.
Bickerstaff is a really good coach, one who can take a team and elevate them to not only respectable but good. He did that in Cleveland, and he's doing it in Detroit. He is one of the ultimate "floor-raising" coaches in the NBA.
Atkinson, however, is a ceiling-raiser. He is capable of taking a good team and making them great. The Cavaliers didn't want to win 50 games and a single playoff series again; they wanted to win a championship, so they made the difficult choice to move on from Bickerstaff and hire Atkinson.
The Pistons aren't winning a title this year or in the next few, whether their coach was Phil Jackson or J. B. Bickerstaff. Yet what they know have is respectability, a winning culture, and a foundation to build on.
It's no surprise to fans of the Cavaliers that Bickerstaff is doing well in Detroit. And at the same time, none of them would want him back. Each franchise got exactly what they needed this summer.