Six People

Remember when I posted this article? In it I explained how Jerry West and Red Auerbach are more responsible than anyone else for their teams winning championships. Well, in this article I'm going a step further: I'm going to show why a majority of championships are attributable to one or more of the same six people. Six people who have decided, or had a hand in deciding, more than half of all championships in NBA history.

Let's go.

Jerry West.

West was a player on the Lakers from 1961 to 1974. In that span he made nine finals and won one. He coached the Lakers to okay success, then worked in the front office from '79 through to '02, in which span the Lakers made 12 finals and won 8. The core he had helped put together made and lost another Finals in '04, and Kobe, a player he was largely responsible for bringing to the Lakers, was a key part of teams that made three straight finals from '08 to '10, winning two. I'm giving West enough credit for those Finals to count them.

From LA, West went to Memphis, making the team better but not making the Finals, and finally to Golden State, in 2011. He left the team in 2017, but the roster he'd assembled made five finals, winning three.

Running Total: 30 Finals, 14 Championships

Red Auerbach.

Auerbach was a coach and GM, then just a GM, and finally a higher-level exec for the Celtics from 1950 (really '51) to around 1990, at which point he lost interest in being heavily involved in the Celtics' affairs. Consequently I'm willing to give him credit for everything through that time, but not the Big 3 era in '08-'10 (i.e. I'm not giving him partial credit for the drafting of Paul Pierce in 1998, which was the only real Big 3-related acquisition before Auerbach's death in 2006).

Final Total: 19 Finals, 16 Championships

Phil Jackson.

Jackson played as a minor player on the champion Knicks of '70 and '73, although I'm not giving him credit because in '70 he was injured all year (but still received a ring) and in '73 he was a minor player and not a contributor on the level that we're talking about for this article. (I'm not interested in dividing up championships into "shares," but it's fair to say that most of these guys constitute a sine qua non, i.e. if they weren't or hadn't been involved their teams likely wouldn't have won. I don't think Jackson in '73 meets that criterion. I do think West in '72 does, which is why I'm counting that ring for him.)

Anyway, after the Knicks Jackson coached for a number of teams, notably the Bulls (from 1990-1998) and the Lakers (from 2000-2011, minus '05), making 13 Finals and winning 11 Championships in the process. It's worth noting, though, that 7 of those Finals and 5 of the Championships overlap with West (and in fact Jackson in a sense "firms up" the latter three Kobe/Gasol Finals and makes them unequivocally count for this list), so I'll note Phil's total and then those championships of Phil that I haven't otherwise attributed.

Final Total: 13 Finals, 6 unique; 11 Championships, 6 unique

Pat Riley.

Riley played for the Lakers in the '70s (although I'm not counting their Finals appearances in '72 or '73 for Riley for the same logic as Jackson's, and because they're already covered by West). Then he coached for the team as an assistant and then head coach from '80 to '90. Following that, he went to the Knicks from '92 to '95, then the Heat from '96 to '08 minus '04 and '05. In that time, and through to the present, he has served as an executive with the Heat as well.

Consequently, Riley gets credit for the '80s Lakers successes (which we're already attributing to West, but which constitute 8 Finals and five rings (n.b. Riley was gone by the Lakers' '91 Finals, and as a coach didn't have enough to do with that team to get credit, not that it matters)), as well as those of the Knicks (a Finals appearance in '94) and Heat (6 appearances and three titles since '06, including most recently an appearance and loss in '20).

Running Total: 15 Finals, 7 unique; 8 Championships, 3 unique

John Kundla.

Time to go way back in time. Kundla was the coach of the Lakers from 1948 to 1959, leading them to six Finals and five Championships (n.b. the Lakers also technically won the 1948 NBL championship under Kundla, but we're not counting it because it was technically a different league, and I'm certainly not bringing in the ABA either).

Final Total: 6 Finals, 5 Championships

Gregg Popovich.

Finally. Popovich coached (and managed) the Spurs to their only six Finals appearances, winning five.

Running Total: 6 Finals, 5 Championships

Tally: These six people, between them, accumulated 74 Finals appearances* and 49 Championships.

While all 49 of those championships are unique (in other words, these six guys have unequivocally accounted for 49 of the 74 total championships in NBA history), those 74 appearances do run into each other (i.e. we're not counting overlaps with the same team, but with OPPOSING teams we are.) For instance, West's Finals appearances as a player were almost all playing against Auerbach's Celtics, and in the '80s, Auerbach (as Celtics GM), West (as Lakers GM), and Riley (as Lakers coach) butted heads in several Finals. So how much overlap is there (i.e. how many Finals included one or more of these guys on either side)? And how many Finals didn't feature at least one of these guys?

Overlap:

1959 - Kundla vs Auerbach
1962, '63, '65, '66, '68, '69 - West vs Auerbach
1984, '85, '87 - West and Riley vs Auerbach
1991 - West vs Jackson
2013, '14 - Popovich vs Riley

So in total, 13/74 Finals featured one or more of these six people on each team.

(Fun fact, and it doesn't count, but in '70 and '73 West's Lakers met player!Jackson's Knicks in the Finals.)

Finals Without the Six:

You can just do the math and determine 74-13 = 61, so the answer's 13. But if you're wondering:

1947 - Stags vs Warriors
1948 - Bullets vs Warriors
1951 - Royals vs Knicks
1955 - Pistons vs Nationals
1956 - Pistons vs Warriors
1967 - Warriors vs 76ers
1971 - Bucks vs Bullets
1975 - Warriors vs Bullets
1977 - Blazers vs 76ers
1978 - Sonics vs Bullets
1979 - Sonics vs Bullets
1990 - Blazers vs Pistons
1995 - Rockets vs Magic

A few quick notes. First of all, I love how many legendary teams are on here -- the '67 76ers (that's the one Wilt team that got past the Celtics) and the '71 Bucks (that's the Kareem/Oscar Robertson team) stand out, and the '90 Pistons and '95 Rockets get talked about a little. Second, it's astounding that every single Finals since 1995 has one or more of our six. That's by far the longest streak in NBA history, at 25 years (second-longest was 10 years from '57-'66), and two of our six were retired or dead. It was all Jackson, Popovich, West, and Riley. I wonder what's causing this, other than a confluence of those four guys being active at the same time. Finally, it's interesting that the '50s and '70s are the decades that we mostly miss, but it makes sense -- Kundla was the only one of our six around for most of the '50s (Auerbach shows up for the first time in the '57 Finals). As for the '70s, that's before Riley, Jackson, or Popovich really showed up as coaches, and West was in his awkward transition between player and exec, so you're really only getting West's player Finals and Auerbach's two titles.

Who Else?

So it's obviously tempting to try to fill the gaps here. And we CAN -- Eddie Gottlieb, Les Harrison, Charles Eckman, someone in the 6ers organization, someone in the Bullets' organization (I can't find a name and I'm not super eager to look), Chuck Daly, and Rudy Tomjanovich could potentially get us to 74/74 appearances with 13 total people (n.b. I'm assuming there are some important people in common through a few of these teams, but I don't know who ran the front office of e.g. the Bullets in the '70s). But none of those guys are really qualified for this list. The point of what we're doing here is to isolate the people most responsible for championships. Unless there really is one guy in common through those four Bullets teams (I don't think there is -- they had three coaches through those four finals -- and even if there was, they'd be 1-3 in Finals and a far stretch from our LEAST successful member, the 5-1 John Kundla), these are basically just random years when our guys just weren't quite there.

We can obviously get to 74/74 rings too with quite a lot more work, but again, there's no one I can find who was responsible for more than two (MAYBE three) rings in that span, and that's just not a level of success that's terribly interesting to me. It's possible there's some exec I'm missing who went from team to team and ended up playing a role in five or more rings outside of the Big Six's sphere, but I seriously doubt it. The teams that won the other 25 championships are a really random assortment. The Warriors have 11 total appearances, but never more than two in a decade (until West showed up). The Sixers likewise show up a couple times but not really in a short span. And then you have a bunch of one- or two-off teams that captured lightning in a bottle: a brief flush of talent along with a down year for our Six. Think the '70s Knicks or the mid-'90s Rockets (the LAST Finals that didn't feature one or more of our Six).

Finally, there are obviously people we can pick up who overlap hugely with one or more of these six guys. For instance, Tex Winter coached under Jackson for all but one of Jackson's championship teams, meaning he's more accomplished than several people on this list as an assistant coach. And Winter in particular played a huge role in organizing the offenses on those teams. But ultimately we're looking for the people who stand out, and to do so I can't include every overlap. This is also the reason you don't see any players -- Bill Russell won 11 championships, yes, but we're giving the credit to Auerbach for the purposes of this exercise, because we can see that Auerbach extended his winning tradition far beyond Russell's tenure. And there's no player who had close to this level of impact without sharing it with one or more coaches.

Coda.

One quick note.

With these six guys, we got to 74 appearances and 49/74 championships. But with only the first four (West, Auerbach, Jackson, and Riley), we could have gotten to 62 appearances and 39/74 championships, which is obviously still more than half. Moreover, the gap between our fourth-most-successful person (Pat Riley, with 15 Finals and 8 Championships) and the last two (6 Finals and 5 Championships apiece) is relatively large. This is particularly interesting because Popovich and Kundla are also the most limited on this list with respect to role (they were both coaches, although Popovich also manages and Kundla had at least some role in management) and team (they both worked for the same team for their whole (relevant) careers and in the same role). In other words, we really have four people of massive scope and two of very large scope. Popovich and Kundla are clearly the LEAST impressive of these six, but my inclination was to include them, if only because they're still much more impressive than anyone else.

Similarly, Popovich and Kundla have by far the weakest cases to even be on this list, because you can make the argument that they were only successful because of their players (Duncan and to a lesser extent Parker, Ginobili, and Robinson for Popovich, and Mikan et al. for Kundla). All the other guys here are very clearly more successful than any of their players (the closest thing to dubious credit would be Tex Winters, again, as assistant coach for Jackson, and I'm simply going with Jackson on that one). Again, I'm choosing to include them. An argument in favor of each: Popovich is obviously largely responsible for the Spurs' consistent success as a franchise, which spans from early in Duncan's career through well into his decline. And Kundla did in fact make a Finals without Mikan (in '59), he just lost.

Finally, Kundla chose to stay in Minnesota when the Lakers moved to LA. It's very possible that if he had gone with the team, he would have shared in a lot of West's successes, and maybe even gotten the team over the top (who knows?). These hypotheticals aren't really the focus of this article, but they're worth noting.