Ranking the Open NBA Coaching Jobs After Mavericks’ Decision to Move On From Jason Kidd

The NBA playoffs are ongoing as the best teams in the league battle to determine this year’s champion. But around the Association, the offseason has begun in earnest. The wheels of change stop for no one and all that. The 26 other teams have already started to make decisions and plan for what next season might look like after falling short of a title this year.

For several of those teams, that meant moving on from their head coach. On Tuesday, the Mavericks joined that particular chorus with the surprising decision to move on from Jason Kidd after five years at the helm. They now join the small group of teams who are actively looking for a new head coach.

The others: the Trail Blazers, Magic and Bulls. Portland lost its head coach after Chauncey Billups was arrested in October but don’t seem interested in retaining Tiago Splitter after he guided the franchise through the rest of the season to the playoffs. Orlando moved on from Jamahl Mosley after a disappointing regular season and a blown 3–1 playoff lead over the Pistons. Chicago needs a new coach after Billy Donovan opted to walk away as the organization finally embraces a rebuilding era. The Pelicans were also in need of a new front man after firing Willie Green months ago but New Orleans hired Mosley once he became available.

Thus, four teams. Four different rosters, four different locations, four different franchises with vastly different goals and timelines to compete. And they’ll all be competing against each other to hire from the same large pool of prospective coaches.

Which team has the upper hand? To figure that out, we ranked the open positions based on how attractive they are to potential candidates, taking into consideration factors such as the talent already on the roster, resources that can be used to improve said roster, the quality of ownership and everything else that goes into taking an NBA head coaching job. There are only 30 of these jobs and so there will be a long line of suitors for each position, but it’s undeniable some are better than others.

Thus, we present our ranking of the open NBA head coaching jobs right now, along with notes on the selling point of each job as well as the biggest question marks.

Ranking the Open NBA Head Coaching Jobs

4. Portland Trail Blazers

Deni Avdija is a great cornerstone as the Blazers build for the future. | Scott Wachter-Imagn Images

Selling point: Playoff roster with a two-way star forward already in place
Biggest question: Will new owner Tom Dundon spend to improve the team?

Under normal circumstances the Blazers would be at or near the top of such a list. They’re coming off a playoff run in which they came from behind to earn the No. 7 seed and put up a good fight against a much better opponent before getting eliminated. The fact that the season didn’t go off the rails entirely after Billups got arrested is a credit to the organization at large. The roster boasts a two-way star wing in the form of 25-year-old Deni Avdija, the exact kind of player every team wants to build around. Intriguing young talents like Scoot Henderson and Donovan Clingan help round out an interesting, gifted core—and they’ll enjoy the veteran mentorship of Damian Lillard on the court next season.

But the Tom Dundon issue is real. While it’s fair to say he should be allowed a runway to acclimate to NBA ownership after adding Portland to a sports portfolio that already featured the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes, he has made no fans with his harsh cost-cutting decisions implemented immediately after he took over in late March. Those measures extend to the coaching situation, where reports collectively suggest Dundon is looking for a low-cost option and got shut down by several prospective candidates for trying to interview them while Splitter still had the job.

His stance is that this is all in an effort to put the best quality product on the floor, but basketball players’ contracts are much more expensive than their NHL counterparts and certainly more expensive than coaches. It is fair at this point to wonder if Dundon is willing or able to put his money where his mouth is as far as actually improving the roster; coaches who aren’t given the best talent due to cheap ownership rarely find success.

3. Chicago Bulls

Selling point: No. 4 pick in the 2026 NBA draft
Biggest question: Will it take too long to make a contender out of this bizarre, imbalanced roster?

The Bulls are shifting into rebuild mode and got a great gift in pursuit of that by moving up the lottery to land the No. 4 pick in the draft. New president of basketball operations Patrick Graham said all the right things in his opening press conference to make people believe Chicago will embrace the slow process of buildling a contender from the ground-up. In that same presser, ownership promised to give him all the resources necessary (and even go into the luxury tax! Gasp!) if there’s a chance the Bulls can finally reach their old heights.

Should Graham prove a quality evaluator of talent, then a prospective coach would be entering a solid situation—a big-market team with a smart head of basketball operations and a true blue chip talent as the foundation going forward.

But the roster as is needs a huge makeover. It features an interesting but flawed playmaker (Josh Giddey), two young wings with potential but not a ton of production to show for it (Matas Buzelis and Noa Essengue) and various reclamation projects like Rob Dillingham and Isaac Okoro. It also has the worst contract in the NBA in Patrick Williams and zero true centers.

This is going to be a long rebuild and Graham said as much in his first press conference. The question is whether ownership actually has the stomach for it, as the Reinsdorfs have prioritized putting butts in seats over anything and everything since Michael Jordan left town 28 years ago. When the times get tough—and they will get tough—will ownership follow through on its promises? In simpler terms, how much time will the new coach really have to help the team grow?

2. Orlando Magic

Selling point: Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner
Biggest question: How much time will a new coach have?

The Magic are the closest thing to an instant winner this list has. They dramatically underachieved last season but showed their potential by pushing the No. 1 seed Pistons to seven games in the first round. It wasn’t enough to save Mosley’s job but it certainly was enough to believe that much winning can be done in Orlando as long as Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner are healthy. This team is a prime candidate to take a big leap just by changing the coach like how Steve Kerr catapulted the Warriors to greatness upon taking over for Mark Jackson or how the Pistons engineered one of the greatest year-over-year improvements ever by replacing Monty Williams with J.B. Bickerstaff. Orlando might not follow exactly in those lofty footsteps, but the roster is an extremely talented one for a new coach to work with.

As a result, however, the pressure will be on to win immediately. The leash will not be very long. The Magic have no time to waste and the new boss will have to embrace that from the first day on. Pairing that reality with the fact that Orlando’s asset cabinet is basically empty after trading for Desmond Bane (and that the roster, while appealing, is not exactly optimized for the modern game) leads to the conclusion that the new coach will have a lot to figure out with little time to do it and few ways to change the status quo. It is enough of a challenge to balance out the quality of the players the coach will have to work with.

1. Dallas Mavericks

Selling point: Cooper Flagg
Biggest question: Everything else

Flagg is everything a coach wants to work with. He is incredibly talented, physically gifted and appears to only be interested in putting his head down to work on becoming the best player he can be. All of this was on display during his exceptional rookie season and you’ll be hard-pressed to find anybody who doesn’t believe he can be a top-five player in the NBA some day—potentially soon. Every team in the league is looking for that player and the Mavericks already having him in place means they are the most attractive job available by a long shot. Flagg’s talent means a lengthy runway for the new hire as Dallas makes its moves with an eye toward his long-term future.

His star is bright enough to mask everything else about this job, which ranges from questionable to bad. The roster around Flagg needs a ton of work to maximize his skillset and is a long way from competing for a playoff spot, even if we assume Kyrie Irving comes back the same player after tearing his ACL—a big assumption to make. Masai Ujiri will be running the show from up top; his triumphant Kawhi Leonard trade earned him a well-regarded reputation but his final years with the Raptors were filled with iffy decisions. Booting Kidd almost immediately upon taking the job despite the four years remaining on his deal shouldn’t inspire a great amount of confidence in the job security aspect. And, of course, there’s the ownership group who signed off on the Luka Dončić trade without fully grasping the consequences. It will take many years before anyone will believe they aren’t one phone call away from blowing up the team again.

Still—it’s Cooper Flagg. The opportunity to help develop a player of his caliber comes along once in a generation for most of the coaches who will be interviewed. And if they can help him become one of the best players in the league, they’ll be employed by NBA teams for as long as they want. That’s a mighty tough opportunity to pass up in favor of the other jobs listed here.

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