Milwaukee Bucks general manager Jon Horst began looking for a new head coach when the organization parted ways with head coach Mike Budenholzer on May 4. During that time, Horst has carefully screened more than a dozen potential coaches for the position and has now narrowed himself down to the position the field will be handed over to a handful of coaches who are finally being considered for the job.
Kenny Atkinson, Adrian Griffin and Nick Nurse will all be meeting with Horst and other franchise executives soon, a league source confirmed to The Athletic. ESPN first reported on the meetings on Monday.
The opportunities for any coaching candidate in Milwaukee are enormous. The Bucks have been one of the best teams in the league for the past five seasons, and two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo is in the midst of his prime, being unanimously selected to the All-NBA First-Team for the fifth straight season.
While the futures of three-time All-Star Khris Middleton and two-time All-Defensive Team center Brook Lopez remain uncertain, the Bucks should have one of the best starting line-ups in the NBA if they both come back and move on to the “Core Four” -Player with Antetokounmpo and two-time All-Star point guard Jrue Holiday. Expectations are among the highest of any team in the league, but the potential for another championship is significant.
With the ins and outs of the Bucks’ opening in mind, let’s take a closer look at the resumes of the three candidates and what they can bring to the Bucks as head coach.
Kenny Atkinson
While Bucks fans might think of Budenholzer first when Atkinson’s name comes up in this search for a head coach, the four years Atkinson spent on Budenholzer’s staff in Atlanta (2012–16) before becoming head coach of the Brooklyn Nets is just one small part of it Atkinson’s basketball resume.
Atkinson started four seasons as a point guard for the University of Richmond, where he helped lead the Spiders to three postseason berths, including in 1988 in the school’s first NCAA Sweet 16 appearance. After his college career, Atkinson played professionally in American minor leagues before moving overseas, playing in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain from 1991 to 2004.
At the 2004 Utah Summer League, Atkinson convinced the new owner of Paris Basket Racing, a French basketball team that eventually disbanded in 2007 and merged with another Parisian club to form the team now known as Metropolitans 92, to join him leave coaching staff. After coaching in Paris for three seasons, then-Rockets general manager Daryl Morey hired Atkinson in 2007 as the team’s director of player development.
When Mike D’Antoni took over as head coach for the Knicks ahead of the 2008-09 season, he asked Atkinson to join his team as an assistant coach. Atkinson served as an assistant coach during D’Antoni’s four-year tenure with the Knicks before joining Budenholzer’s team with the Hawks in 2012. With the Hawks still in the 2016 NBA playoffs, the Brooklyn Nets announced that Atkinson would be their next head coach on April 17th, 2016.
In three-and-a-half seasons with Atkinson as head coach, the Nets compiled a regular-season record 118-190 (.383 win rate). While the team struggled during Atkinson’s first two seasons trying to rehabilitate a squad that had just endured the impact of Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce’s asset swap, only to then have to watch their performance slacked off, the Nets turned around in their third season with Atkinson as head coach and made the playoffs with a 42-40 record.
The team’s chemistry was praised throughout the 2018/19 season as Atkinson helped vindicate the careers of D’Angelo Russell, Joe Harris and Spencer Dinwiddie while also helping to develop Caris LeVert and Jarrett Allen into a single unit, who worked together and made it to the playoffs. The program Atkinson built was highlighted as extremely positive when Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant decided to sign with the Nets ahead of the start of the 2019-20 season.
| From Rtg | LG rank | Def Rtg | LG rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2016-17 | 103.6 | 29 | 111.2 | 23 |
2017-18 | 106.8 | 22 | 110.7 | 22 |
2018-19 | 109.7 | 20 | 109.9 | 15 |
2019-20 | 109.4 | 22 | 109.8 | 9 |
However, with Durant sitting out the entire first season in Brooklyn, the Nets struggled to integrate Irving, and Atkinson and the Nets parted ways on March 7, 2020, just weeks before the league shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While Atkinson grew the franchise enough to sign Irving and Durant (in a “sign and trade”), he never had the opportunity to coach the duo and see what he could do with a potential title contender could.
Ahead of the start of the 2020–21 season, Atkinson joined the LA Clippers coaching staff from Ty Lue. After a season with the Clippers, Atkinson moved north and joined Steve Kerr’s Golden State Warriors staff. While Atkinson briefly appeared 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 championship run in 2022 and gave high praise for Atkinson’s work in connecting the front office and the coaching staff.
Why it might work: Atkinson sat on the bench with D’Antoni, Budenholzer and Kerr and worked as an assistant coach with three strong attacking heads. All three designed different offensive game plans and utilized their superstar talents in different ways, so Atkinson could have some interesting and unique ideas for the Bucks up front, which could be significant considering the Bucks’ halffield offense has stalled the postseason for the last five years with Budenholzer.
Additionally, the Nets were among the top 10 defensemen in Atkinson’s final season after Allen blossomed into a powerful rim protector. With more talent in Milwaukee, Atkinson can potentially help the Bucks shine on both sides of the field.
Why it might not work: While he can draw on his experience as an assistant to the Warriors as they win the 2022 title, he doesn’t have the experience as a head coach to oversee a team with title hopes. With the responsibility for everything and the task of making the most important decisions in the decisive moments, there are different pressures that come with it.
Adrian Griffin
Griffin is the only one of the three finalists with no experience as a head coach, but he’s still been in the NBA for nearly 25 years.
As a player, Griffin was a three-year starter at Seton Hall University after being recruited by PJ Carlesimo, and made two NCAA tournament appearances with the team. Post college, Griffin worked in minor American league basketball and played in Italy for three years before being signed by the Boston Celtics ahead of the 1999-00 season. Griffin started immediately in more than half of the Celtics’ games this season and stayed in the NBA for a total of nine seasons as a defensive winger with stints in Dallas, Houston, Chicago and Seattle.
Prior to the 2008-09 season, Griffin was traded from Oklahoma City to the Bucks, who were then coached by Scott Skiles, who coached Griffin with the Bulls in 2007. As the Bucks made their final cuts at training camp, Griffin received the No Player Wants To Receive call from the head coach. Skiles informed Griffin of his dismissal, but also asked him if he wanted to stay with the organization and join the coaching staff.
Griffin accepted Skiles’ offer and began his coaching career with the Bucks in 2008, where he has been an NBA assistant coach for the past 15 seasons. After two seasons with the Bucks, Griffin moved to Chicago and joined the coaching staff of Tom Thibodeau for the next five seasons with the Bulls. In Chicago, he worked alongside the defensive-minded Thibodeau, but also did what he calls an “apprenticeship” under Ron Adams, one of the NBA’s most respected assistant coaches, which helped him better understand individual player development 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 at Chicago, Griffin returned to Skiles for the 2015–16 season in Orlando before joining Billy Donovan’s team in Oklahoma City for two seasons from 2016–18. After two seasons with Donovan, Griffin was nominated for a spot on the Raptors’ bench with Nick Nurse, who was assembling an assistant squad for the first time in the NBA. Griffin has been with the Raptors for five years but is also said to have interviewed for senior positions with the Bulls, Grizzlies, Jazz, Pistons and Rockets during the same period.
As detailed by Raptors Beat writer Eric Koreen, Nurse was aware that many organizations in the league viewed Griffin as a defensive-minded coach because of his play style 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 in order to become a more versatile coach.
Why it might work: Griffin has spent a lot of time as an assistant coach working with great defensive minds like Nurse, Skiles and Thibodeau and may have new ideas on how to build an elite defense in Milwaukee. Working with Nurse in Toronto also gave him the opportunity to experiment more down the floor. There is no track record of what plans he might come up with, so there is a possibility of innovation and new ideas.
Why it might not work: He’s never been the head coach of the NBA and taking over from Milwaukee to Budenholzer would be a pressurized situation. The standards will be incredibly high and it could be too much for a new head coach.
Nick Nurse
Like Atkinson, Nurse took a winding road to becoming NBA head coach. And like the other two contestants, Nurse played Division I college basketball in Northern Iowa, where he appeared in 111 games and still holds the record for the highest three-point throwing average (47 percent).
After graduating as a player, Nurse worked as a student assistant at the school before taking the position of head coach at the age of 23 at Grand View University, an NAIA school in Des Moines, Iowa. After serving as the head coach at Grand View for two seasons, Nurse accepted a position as an assistant coach at the University of South Dakota for two seasons before making a huge career change and going overseas to coach for the next 11 years.
Before coaching at Grand View, Nurse spent a season as player-coach of the British Basketball League (BBL) Derby Storm. And wanting 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, managing 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 United States in 2007.
In the early days of the G League (then the NBA’s D-League), Nurse joined expansion team Iowa Energy in Des Moines as head coach. For four seasons, Nurse led the Energy in the D-League, eventually winning the 2011 D-League Championship before taking over the Rio Grande Vipers, an offshoot 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 team ahead of the start of the 2013-14 season. During his five seasons as Casey’s assistant, Nurse earned a reputation as a creative offensive spirit. His work in redesigning the offense ahead of the 2017–18 season helped Nurse take over as head coach ahead of the 2018–19 season.
As Bucks fans will recall, Nurse won an NBA title in his first season as head coach of the Raptors. Toronto switched to Kawhi Leonard, who played a key role in the Raptors beating the No. 1-seeded Bucks in the 2019 Eastern Conference Finals and beating the Warriors in the NBA Finals. In the championship series, Nurse employed some unusual defensive strategies, introducing a box-and-one defense against Warriors star Steph Curry in Game 2 after both Durant and Klay Thompson suffered injuries.
| From Rtg | LG rank | Def Rtg | LG rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2018-19 | 113.5 | 6 | 107.3 | 5 |
2019-20 | 111.3 | 15 | 105.3 | 2 |
2020-21 | 112.2 | 16 | 113.3 | 19 |
2021-22 | 112.9 | 16 | 110.7 | 10 |
2022-23 | 115.9 | 12 | 114.4 | 14 |
In five seasons with the Raptors, Nurse averaged a 227-163 regular-season record (.582) and the Raptors made the playoffs three times but never regained the magic they showed in the 2018- 19 had found Leonard’s only season was in Toronto. For the past four seasons, the Raptors have been one of the more adventurous teams in the NBA. Nurse featured lineups without traditional centers and played an aggressive defensive style that forced more turnovers than any other NBA team.
Why it might work: Having won an NBA championship before, Nurse knows what it takes to see a team through the postseason and win the Larry O’Brien Trophy. He’s creative and flexible, and the Bucks could do better following Budenholzer. Getting a full team and a Superstar in Leonard, Nurse helped his team have a top season, both offensively and defensively, and it only took him one season to achieve that.
As a first-time NBA head coach, Nurse got results quickly. If the Bucks manage to hold onto their championship roster this postseason, they’ll expect the same next season.
Why it might not work: The Raptors haven’t been a very good offensive team at halffield for the past three seasons. According to Cleaning the Glass, they’ve ranked 20th, 26th, and 25th in halffield offensive efficiency for the past three seasons, respectively. Although her team had some clear limitations on offense, it’s potentially concerning for Nurse not finding success in situations like this given how offensively the Bucks struggled in the playoffs.
(Photo by Nick Nurse and Adrian Griffin: Ron Turenne/NBAE via Getty Images)