Bucks coaching candidates: Why they may work and why they may not

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Milwaukee Bucks general manager Jon Horst started the process of finding a new head coach when the organization parted ways with head coach Mike Budenholzer on May 4. In that time, Horst has carefully considered more than a dozen potential coaches for the position and now has narrowed the field to a handful of coaches that will receive final consideration for the job.

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Kenny Atkinson, Adrian Griffin and Nick Nurse will all meet soon with Horst and other franchise leaders, a league source confirmed to The Athletic. ESPN first reported the meetings on Monday.

The opportunity for any coaching candidate in Milwaukee is massive. The Bucks have been one of the league’s best teams for the last five seasons and two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo is in the middle of his prime, coming off his fifth consecutive unanimous All-NBA First-Team selection.

While the futures of three-time All-Star Khris Middleton and two-time All-Defensive Team center Brook Lopez are yet to be determined, the Bucks should have one of the best starting lineups in the NBA if both come back and continue forward as “core four” players with Antetokounmpo and two-time All-Star point guard Jrue Holiday. The expectations are among the highest for any team around the league, but the potential for another championship is significant.

With the specifics of the Bucks’ opening in mind, let’s take a closer look at the three candidates’ résumés and what they might be able to bring to the Bucks as head coach.

Kenny Atkinson

While Bucks fans might think of Budenholzer initially when Atkinson’s name gets brought up in this head coaching search, the four years Atkinson spent on Budenholzer’s staff in Atlanta (2012-16) before becoming the head coach of the Brooklyn Nets are only a small part of Atkinson’s basketball résumé.

Atkinson started four seasons at point guard for the University of Richmond where he helped lead the Spiders to three postseason berths, including the school’s first NCAA Sweet 16 appearance in 1988. After his collegiate career, Atkinson played professionally in American minor leagues before moving overseas and playing in Italy, France, The Netherlands, Germany and Spain from 1991 to 2004.

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At the Utah Summer League in 2004, Atkinson convinced the new owner of Paris Basket Racing, a French basketball team that eventually dissolved and merged with another Paris club in 2007 to form the team that is now known as Metropolitans 92, to let him join the coaching staff. After coaching in Paris for three seasons, then Rockets general manager Daryl Morey hired Atkinson to be the team’s director of player development in 2007.

When Mike D’Antoni took the Knicks head coaching position before the 2008-09 season, he asked Atkinson to join his staff as an assistant coach. Atkinson served as an assistant coach for D’Antoni’s four-year tenure with the Knicks before joining Budenholzer’s staff with the Hawks in 2012. With the Hawks still in the 2016 NBA playoffs, the Brooklyn Nets announced Atkinson would be their next head coach on April 17, 2016.

In three and a half seasons with Atkinson as head coach, the Nets put together a 118-190 regular-season record (.383 winning percentage). While the team struggled in Atkinson’s first two seasons as they tried to rehab a roster that had just gone through the effects of trading away assets to add Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce only to watch their play decline, the Nets turned it around in their third season with Atkinson as head coach and made the playoffs with a 42-40 record.

The team’s chemistry was lauded throughout the 2018-19 season as Atkinson helped rehabilitate the careers of D’Angelo Russell, Joe Harris and Spencer Dinwiddie, while also helping develop Caris LeVert and Jarrett Allen, into a unit that worked together and made a run to the playoffs. The program Atkinson built was brought up as a major positive when Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant opted to sign with the Nets before the start of the 2019-20 season.

However, with Durant out for the entirety of his first season in Brooklyn, the Nets struggled to integrate Irving, and Atkinson and the Nets parted ways on March 7, 2020, a few weeks before the league shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Atkinson built up the franchise to a position to sign Irving and Durant (in a sign-and-trade), he never got a chance to coach the duo and see what he could do with a potential title-contending team.

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Before the start of the 2020-21 season, Atkinson joined Ty Lue’s LA Clippers coaching staff. After one season with the Clippers, Atkinson moved north and joined Steve Kerr’s Golden State Warriors staff. While Atkinson briefly seemed ready to take over as coach of the Charlotte Hornets last summer, he has spent the last two seasons as an assistant coach with the Warriors. Kerr called Atkinson “the liaison between the coaching staff and the analytics department” during the team’s 2022 championship run and heaped massive praise on Atkinson’s work connecting the front office and the coaching staff.

Why it might work: With time on the bench with D’Antoni, Budenholzer and Kerr, Atkinson has spent time as an assistant coach with three strong offensive minds. All three drew up different offensive game plans and used their superstar talents in different ways, so Atkinson could have some interesting and unique ideas for the Bucks on the offensive end, which could be significant considering the Bucks’ half-court offense has bogged down in the postseason over the last five years with Budenholzer.

On top of that, once Allen blossomed into a strong rim protector, the Nets performed as a top-10 defense in Atkinson’s final season. With more talent in Milwaukee, Atkinson may be able to help the Bucks excel on both ends of the floor.

Why it might not work: While he may be able to lean on his experience as an assistant for the 2022 title-winning Warriors, he doesn’t have the head-coaching experience of leading a team with title expectations. There is a different level of pressure that goes along with being in charge of everything and being the person tasked with making the most important decisions in the biggest moments.

Adrian Griffin

Griffin is the only one of the three finalists without head-coaching experience, but he has still been in the NBA for almost 25 years.

As a player, Griffin was a three-year starter at Seton Hall University after being recruited by P.J. Carlesimo and made two NCAA Tournament appearances with the team. Following his collegiate career, Griffin toiled in American basketball minor leagues and played in Italy for three years before getting signed by the Boston Celtics before the 1999-00 season. Griffin immediately started over half of the Celtics’ games that season and stuck around in the NBA for nine total seasons as a defensive-minded wing with stops also in Dallas, Houston, Chicago and Seattle.

Before the 2008-09 season, Griffin was traded from Oklahoma City to the Bucks, who were then coached by Scott Skiles, who had coached Griffin with the Bulls in 2007. As the Bucks made their final cuts at training camp, Griffin got the call no player wants to receive from the head coach. Skiles informed Griffin that he was being released, but also asked him if he wanted to stay with the organization and join the coaching staff.

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Griffin took up Skiles on the offer and started his coaching career with the Bucks in 2008 and been at it as an NBA assistant coach for the last 15 seasons. After two seasons with the Bucks, Griffin moved to Chicago and joined Tom Thibodeau’s coaching staff for the next five seasons with the Bulls. In Chicago, he worked with the defensive-minded Thibodeau but also took part in what he calls an “apprenticeship” under Ron Adams, one of the NBA’s most respected assistant coaches, which helped him better understand one-on-one player development by being paired with Jimmy Butler.

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Video Gamer: A week in the life of Raptors assistant coach Adrian Griffin

After five seasons with Thibodeau in Chicago, Griffin rejoined Skiles for the 2015-16 season in Orlando before joining Billy Donovan’s staff in Oklahoma City for two seasons from 2016-18. After two seasons with Donovan, Griffin was tabbed for a spot on the Raptors bench with Nick Nurse, who was assembling a group of assistants for the first time in the NBA. Griffin has been with the Raptors for the last five years but also reportedly interviewed for head positions with the Bulls, Grizzlies, Jazz, Pistons and Rockets during that same time frame.

As detailed by Raptors beat writer Eric Koreen, Nurse was aware that many organizations around the league see Griffin as a defensive-minded coach because of how he played and the time he spent with Skiles and Thibodeau. But Nurse allowed Griffin to work on other things during his time as an assistant coach in Toronto to become a more well-rounded coach.

Why it might work: Griffin has spent considerable time as an assistant coach working with great defensive minds like Nurse, Skiles and Thibodeau and may have fresh ideas on how to build an elite defense in Milwaukee. Working with Nurse in Toronto, he also was given a chance to experiment more on the other end of the floor. There is no track record of what schemes he might draw up, so there is some possibility of innovation and new ideas.

Why it might not work: He’s never been an NBA head coach and taking over in Milwaukee after Budenholzer would be a pressure-packed situation. The standards will be incredibly high and it might be too much for a first-time head coach.

Nick Nurse

Like Atkinson, Nurse took a winding road to becoming an NBA head coach. And like the other two candidates, Nurse played Division I college basketball at Northern Iowa, where he appeared in 111 games and still holds the record for the highest 3-point shooting percentage (47 percent).

After finishing as a player, Nurse served as a student assistant at the school before taking the head coaching position at Grand View University, an NAIA school in Des Moines, Iowa, at 23 years old. After serving as the head coach at Grand View for two seasons, Nurse took an assistant coaching job at the University of South Dakota for two seasons before embarking on a massive professional change and heading overseas to coach for the next 11 years.

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Before coaching at Grand View, Nurse spent one season as the player-coach of the Derby Storm in the British Basketball League (BBL). And when he wanted a change after Grand View, he made his way back to England and coached the Birmingham Bullets in the BBL. Nurse gained experience as a head coach and led four teams in the BBL and one team in Belgium over the next decade. He won two BBL championships and was twice named BBL Coach of the Year before returning to the U.S. in 2007.

In the early days of the G League (then the NBA’s D-League), Nurse joined the expansion Iowa Energy in Des Moines as head coach. For four seasons, Nurse led the Energy in the D-League and eventually won the 2011 D-League Championship before leaving to take over the Rio Grande Vipers, an affiliate of the Houston Rockets. Nurse experimented with some new ideas and the Vipers won the 2013 D-League championship.

Nurse’s time in the D-League eventually caught the attention of NBA general managers and Masai Ujiri hired him as an assistant coach for Dwane Casey’s Toronto Raptors staff before the start of the 2013-14 season. During his five seasons as an assistant for Casey, Nurse earned a reputation for being a creative offensive mind. His work in revamping the offense before the 2017-18 season played a role in Nurse taking over as head coach before the 2018-19 season.

As Bucks fans remember, Nurse won an NBA title in his first season as head coach of the Raptors. Toronto traded for Kawhi Leonard, who played a major role in the Raptors upsetting the No. 1-seeded Bucks in the 2019 Eastern Conference finals and taking down the Warriors in the NBA Finals. In the championship series, Nurse did some unusual defensive strategies, rolling out a box-and-one defense in Game 2 against Warriors star Steph Curry after both Durant and Klay Thompson suffered injuries.

In five seasons with the Raptors, Nurse put up a 227-163 regular-season record (.582) and the Raptors made three playoff appearances, but they never recaptured the magic they found in the 2018-19 season, which was Leonard’s only season in Toronto. For the last four seasons, the Raptors have been one of the more experimental teams in the NBA with Nurse having lineups without traditional centers and playing an aggressive defensive style that has forced more turnovers than any other NBA team.

Why it might work: Nurse has already won an NBA championship and knows what it takes to get a team through the postseason and hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy. He is creative and flexible, which the Bucks could use more of following Budenholzer. When given a complete team and a superstar in Leonard, Nurse helped his team produce an elite season, both offensively and defensively, and it only took him one season to accomplish it.

As a first-time NBA head coach, Nurse got results and got them quickly. If the Bucks manage to maintain their championship roster this postseason, they’ll be expecting the same next season.

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Why it might not work: The Raptors haven’t been a very good offensive team in half-court settings for the last three seasons. Per Cleaning the Glass, they have finished 20th, 26th and 25th in half-court offensive efficiency over the last three seasons, respectively. While their personnel had some clear limitations on the offensive end, not being able to find success in those situations is potentially worrisome for Nurse, considering the Bucks’ offensive struggles during the playoffs.

(Photo of Nick Nurse and Adrian Griffin: Ron Turenne / NBAE via Getty Images)

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