Let's take a look at the 11 most titled coaches in NBA history, including conference titles and Coach of the Year awards.
11. Bill Fitch
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Bill Fitch, who spent 15 years as an American college coach before joining the NBA, initiates our list. In 1970, he won the first Coach Of The Year Award with the Cleveland Cavaliers, with whom he remained until 1979 and with whom he distinguished himself in 1976, the year in which he won the award. Following his time in Cleveland, he spent his most successful years with the Boston Celtics, winning the NBA title in 1981 and the Eastern Conference title the year before, as well as the second manager of the year award in 1980 and being nominated as coach of the All-Star Game in 1982.
In 1983, he became the head coach of the Houston Rockets, with whom he won his second Conference championship. After 2050 trained games and five trophies, he retired in 1998, just short of 1000 career victories: 999 total victories, including those in the regular season (944) and the playoffs (55).
10. John Kundla
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John Kundla, who only has NBA titles in his collection, has five trophies. The bill could be higher, but at the time, the Conference award for teams reaching the Finals had not yet been established, as had the Coach Of The Year award, which was only given out starting in the 1962 season. Despite this, Coach Kundla made history in the NBA's early days, leading the Minneapolis Lakers to the league's first Three-peat (victory in the NBA title for three consecutive years), a feat that was only matched by two other teams, which we will discuss later.
The 1948 NBL championship is also excluded from the count, as it was one of the two leagues (the other being the BAA) that merged to form the NBA at the start of the 1948-49 season. Kundla and his Lakers (forerunners of today's Los Angeles Lakers) dominated the early 1950s, winning four championships in five years and igniting a rivalry with the Boston Celtics, who dominated the second half of the decade.
9. Larry Brown
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After a career as an exclusively ABA player (the NBA's rival league in the 1960s and 1970s), Larry Brown began coaching in the NCAA, then moved on to the NBA, and finally a brief stint in Italy, at Auxilium Torino, in 2018. So, when his Detroit Pistons won the ring in 2004, he had to wait nearly 30 years to see the first Larry O'Brien Trophy. He also won two Eastern Conference championships with the Pistons and was named Coach of the Year in 2001. Larry Brown has five career trophies, including the Eastern Conference title with the 76ers in 2001.
It's also worth noting that, with over 2000 games under his belt, Brown joined a select group of coaches with at least 1000 victories (in Brown's case, 1098), and a win percentage of 54.8 percent. In addition, as an assistant coach, he won the gold medal at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 and led Team USA to a bronze medal at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004.
8. Chuck Daly
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Chuck Daly coached the Detroit Pistons, which included Dennis Rodman, Isiah Thomas, and Joe Dumars, to two consecutive championships in 1989 and 1990, as well as three conference titles between 1988 and 1990. Daly, who has never won a Coach of the Year award, is ranked eighth in the all-time list of the most successful coaches, with five trophies in his twenty-year career.
He then has a win percentage of 59.3 percent, which rises to 59.5 percent in the Playoffs; not to mention his appearance as a coach at the 1990 All-Star Game and, above all, the gold medal with the Dream Team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
7. Erik Spoelstra
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As we move up the rankings, we come across Erik Spoelstra, who has led the Miami Heat to six championships since 2008, including two NBA titles and four Eastern Conference titles. He never won Coach of the Year, but he did lead the selection of the Eastern All-Stars at that year's All-Star Game.
In his career, he has 564 victories out of 951 games coached, for a victory percentage of 59.3 percent, while in the Playoffs, he has 71 victories out of 118 total games, for a victory percentage of 60.2 percent.
6. KC Jones
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KC Jones has won eight NBA championships as a player with the Boston Celtics from 1959 to 1966, two more as an assistant coach (one with the Lakers in 1972 and one with the Celtics in 1981), and two more as the head coach of the Massachusetts franchise.
After the first in 1974-75 with the Washington Bullets (the predecessors of the Washington Wizards) and the second in 1983 with the Philadelphia Sixers, he returned to the Finals three times in a row with the same team, winning three conference titles between 1984 and 1986.
Jones is currently ranked sixth in our rankings, with a total of six trophies. To recall his five All-Star Games as Eastern Conference coach between 1975 and 1987, as well as his 522 regular-season victories out of 774, which earned him a victory percentage of 67.4 percent, the fourth-highest in league history among coaches with at least 500 games coached.
5. Steve Kerr
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Then there's Steve Kerr, who has already won nine trophies in his still-short head coaching career, which began in 2014 with the Golden State Warriors. As a result, the three Larry O'Brien Trophies, the five consecutive Western Conference titles from 2015 to 2019, and the Coach Of The Year Award in 2016, the year in which he broke the Chicago Bulls' record of 72-10 from 1995-96, a team he was a member of and with whom he won three titles as a three-point specialist, all enter the count.
We should also remember his two All-Star Game coaching appointments in 2015 and 2017, as well as the high percentage of victories (70.9%) out of 475 total games coached. He has the highest win rate (73.3 percent) in the league's history, with 77 victories in 105 playoff games. He was also the first head coach to win 67 regular-season games in three consecutive seasons.
4. Red Auerbach
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Red Auerbach ranks one of the most successful coaches in NBA history, with a total of ten trophies. However, if only Conference titles were included in the official count, which was instead calculated starting with the 1970-71 season, it would be much higher, as a silver trophy is awarded to the winning franchise of the Conference Finals.
He won nine NBA titles in ten Finals appearances and the coach of the year award in 1965, which was renamed "Red Auerbach Coach Of The Year Award" two years later in his honor. After retiring as a manager at the end of the 1966 season after 1417 games as a head coach and 938 victories, he went on to become the General Manager of his Boston Celtics, which won another seven championships under his leadership.
3. Gregg Popovich
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Gregg Popovich has won 14 total trophies in his career, all with the San Antonio Spurs. Between 1999 and 2014, the team won five NBA championships, six conference championships, and three Coach of the Year awards. Then there are the four All-Star Games in which the Western Conference has been in charge.
Furthermore, if the 1996-97 season, Pop's first as a head coach, is excluded, Pop has won more than 50% of the time in every season he has been in charge: the best year was 2015-16 when his team won 81.7 percent of the time.
Popovich is also third all-time in league history with 1272 regular-season victories out of a total of 1883 (ninth all-time), as well as third among head coaches who have coached at least 500 games for the percentage of wins in the regular season.
2. Pat Riley
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Pat Riley is in second place with 17 career awards, including 5 NBA titles, 9 Conference titles, and 3 Coach of the Year awards; 9 All-Star Game calls do not count. The Showtime Lakers of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won the first four titles in the 1980s, while the Miami Heat of Dwyane Wade and Shaquille O'Neal won the last one in 2006, almost 20 years after the first. The COY awards, on the other hand, were all given out in the 1990s, with the first two going to the New York Knicks and the Miami Heat (the last).
Riley, along with Alex Hannum, became the only head coach to lead three different teams to the Finals after winning the Larry O'Brien Trophy in 2006. He is also the only person, alongside Phil Jackson, to have won the NBA championship with two different teams. Finally, Riley won one championship as a player (with the Lakers in 1972) and three as the executive director of the Miami Heat: the first was in 2006, and the other two came in 2012 and 2013.
1. Phil Jackson
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As a result, Phil Jackson, who has a total of 25 trophies in his twenty-year career as head coach, sits atop the podium. The former coach holds the record for most NBA championships won by a coach, with 11: six with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, the last of which is detailed in the TV show The Last Dance, and five with the Los Angeles Lakers from 2000 to 2010. The 13 Conference titles (6 with the Bulls, 7 with the Lakers) and the Coach of the Year award (in 1996) must be added to this. The four calls to coach the All-Star Game in 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2009 remain unaccounted for.
He was then named to the NBA's list of the top ten coaches in history in 1996. Jackson then went on to win two Three-peats with two different teams, making him the only coach in league history to do so. In the regular season, he has the highest win percentage of any coach in the basketball Hall of Fame, and the highest of all coaches who have coached at least 500 games. Finally, he is the seventh-winningest coach in history (1155), with a winning record (and thus a winning percentage of more than 50%) in every season he coached.
