Coach RAPM: Which NBA Coaches Actually Make Their Teams Better

How my coaching metric works and what the results look like for today's NBA coaches

Coach RAPM rates Phil Jackson as one of the greatest coaches of all time, but for Steve Kerr and Joe Mazzulla, their ratings don’t match their reputations. (Soobum Im/Jonathan Daniel/Allsport/Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)

The NBA has some of the best-paid coaches in sports. Steve Kerr, Erik Spoelstra and Ty Lue all rank among the top 25 in the world in salary.

But which NBA coaches actually make their teams better, and by how much?

There’s a stat for that: Coach RAPM, a variation on the plus-minus family of stats that we use to rate players.

With the 2026-27 season tipping off tomorrow, we ran Coach RAPM for every NBA coach with at least one year of experience. Some of the results line up with conventional wisdom. Others don’t.

For instance, the top-rated active coach isn’t a champion. Kerr, Spoelstra, and Lue, the highest-paid coaches, are all outside the top three in this rating. And the third-ranked coach has been on the job for only one season.

Below, we explain how Coach RAPM works — and what it does and does not tell you.

We also include the full chart of current coaches with confidence intervals, and take a look at some of the best-rated coaches of the past 30 years.