There's a trend going around the NBA this season that's pretty easy to miss — and that's because it isn't even happening on the court. It's happening on the sidelines.
The average age of the league's head coaches this season is just 49.2 years old, which makes this the youngest season for head coaches in at least the last 25 years.
Datawrapper charts don't always embed in emails. Click here for a screenshot.
The previous youngest was actually back during that 2001-02 season, the first year of the 25-year sample I used here. The league then trended toward older coaches for a few years after that, with the average age of head coaches peaking at 53.6 years old in during the 2009-10 campaign. That season and the next, just before the 2011 lockout, are the only seasons in the 25-year sample where the average age of the league's head coaches was over 53 years old.
Note: I calculated the average age of coaches using the coach that coached the most games for that team in the given season, no matter whether that coach finished the season or not. So, for example, I used Michael Malone as the Nuggets' coach for the 2024-25 season, even though David Adelman was coaching them by the end of the year.
Within a few years, the average age of coaches dropped all the way down to 50 years old again... and then spiked back up in 52.9 years old for the 2019-20 season, since when it has been in decline with each passing season. And now it's at the youngest point in multiple decades.
Some of this is driven by the recent hiring practices. Seven teams have new coaches this season compared with the one who was leading them at the beginning of last year. Of those seven, five — James Borrego, David Adelman, Tiago Splitter, Jordan Ott, and Mitch Johnson — are younger than 50 years old and four are younger than 45.
Note: I did use Johnson as San Antonio's head coach in the calculation of 2024-25's average age because he coached the most games for the Spurs, but I'm including him here because he only technically got the full-time job this season after he unexpectedly had to take over for Gregg Popovich last year.
Of those five coaches, only Borrego is older than the man he replaced. And even the two relatively older coaches that got hired are either the same age or younger than the coach whose job they filled. Doug Christie is the same age as Mike Brown and Brown is in turn younger than Tom Thibodeau.
Meanwhile, of the coaches currently in jobs, only Brown, Christie, Chris Finch, Nick Nurse, Kenny Atkinson, Quin Snyder, Billy Donovan, Doc Rivers, and Rick Carlisle got those gigs at 50 or older. That's just 30% of the league. And the only coaches hired for their current job at an age older than 55 are Atkinson, Rivers, and Carlisle. That's 10% of the league. Everybody else was in their 30s or 40s when they got the job they currently hold.
The youngest coaches in the league are also having a lot of success. More success than was expected of them this season, in fact. To exemplify this, I calculated the winning percentage plus-minus for each NBA team and plotted it against the age of that team's head coach.
Winning percentage plus-minus is a team's actual winning percentage compared with its expected winning percentage as determined by preseason over-unders. For example, the Suns had a 30.5-win over-under coming into this season, giving them an expected winning percentage of just .372. At 31-22 as of this writing on Tuesday afternoon, they actually have a .585 winning percentage. So their winning percentage plus-minus is .213, by far the highest in the league to date.
Click here for a screenshot.
At 40 years old, Ott is also the fourth-youngest head coach in the NBA. And each of those four youngest coaches — Joe Mazzulla, Will Hardy, and Mitch Johnson are the others — are leading teams that are exceeding their expected winning percentages.
The league's oldest coaches, meanwhile, are mostly leading teams that are not meeting their expected winning percentages. Carlisle's Pacers, Rivers' Bucks, and Steve Kerr's Warriors all have a negative winning percentage plus-minus. Donovan's Bulls have a positive mark but Snyder's Hawks are negative.
The Pacers, who have the league's oldest coach in Carlisle, have the second-worst winning percentage plus-minus, ranking ahead of only the decrepit Kings. Both of those teams are among the 10 with coaches who are 55 or older. The only teams with 55-or-older head coaches that are exceeding their expected winning percentage are the 76ers, Heat, and Bulls. And the Bulls will almost surely drop off that pace soon after their trade deadline sell-off. (They're only at a .036 winning percentage plus-minus right now.)
The obvious question that follows these trends is, why? Why are teams hiring younger coaches, and why are those younger coaches finding success relative to expectations.
I was listening to Bill Simmons' podcast with Tim Legler a couple weeks ago and they speculated that it could have something to do with younger coaches having grown up in an environment where the analytics movement was always part of the game and therefore they are able to better communicate with players about how the numbers can help them perform and win at a higher level. That's a pretty good theory, I think, but it's also one that probably doesn't explain the phenomenon entirely on its own.
I think you could make an argument that younger coaches are more likely to be on the cutting edge, tactics-wise, than their older counterparts, even if only because they're still creating and developing their schemes while older coaches have had their systems for years and are more likely to make small tweaks rather than reinvent the wheel entirely. I'm not 100% sure I buy that because plenty of older coaches are plenty inventive and willing to change; see Erik Spoelstra's Heat this year for perhaps the best example of that. (And yes, at 55 years old, Spoelstra is now an "older" coach.) But the younger coaches are perhaps more likely to be modern in their schemes because modern is what they know best.
Those are just two theories, but I'm sure there are plenty of others. One could even be that this is just a momentary blip, for example, and that older coaches will bounce back next year. (The five-year trend does show slightly less correlation between head coach age and winning percentage plus-minus, but it's still there. Though that is perhaps driven by this season being part of the sample.)
But the hiring trend of teams pursuing these coaches who are on the younger side seems unlikely to stop, to me. We've seen the NFL trending that way for a while, for example, and it wouldn't be surprising if the NBA continued the same way. Pushing the envelope and nudging the game forward are always going to be goals for teams, and the current crop of young coaches has certainly been doing that. It's a copy-cat league, and if the young coaches continue having success, teams will continue looking to tap into that pipeline.
