Lindsay Whalen steps down from Minnesota

[Coler]

Any early front runners for the job?

 

[JellyBean]

Any early front runners for the job?

Nothing on the radar yet. There are always a list of candidates and potential hires but nothing brewing yet...on the front burner. On the backend, I am sure there are phone calls being made.

 

[Littlemin]

Once again this shows that great players don't make great coaches. For every Bill Russell, there are countless Larry Bird's and now after Cynthia Cooper we have Lindsay Whalen...The best coaches seem to be role players who sat and watched a lot and can teach the game to others great players don't have the communication skills to explain how to do something that was natural to them and can't deal with the effects of losing especially winning do much in their careers.

I agree 100% with your premise but not necessarily your choices cited to prove your point; Bird coached three years and won over 2/3 of his regular season games and over 60% of playoff games, including winning a conference championship. Russell had great success coaching the Celtics, no question, but that was a unique situation, taking over as player / coach of a team he had played with and led for 10 seasons prior. He had virtually no real success during his 5 year tenure at Seattle, finishing 4 games under .500 his first 4 years, and leaving during his 5th after 58 games with a 17-41 record.

 

[MSSportsGuy]

We all know great players don't always make great coaches. Dawn Staley has of course been phenomenal but I think it helped she was at Temple for a few years, which frankly had less of a spotlight placed on her despite being a Philly native. Whalen grew up in MN, played at the school, won titles with the Lynx, and was a newbie entering a job in a major conference so the spotlight and expectations on her were large. I suspect Dawn learned some things in her time at Temple, plus it appears she's surrounded herself with good people both there and SC.

Tina Thompson did very poorly at UVA, NMP didn't do very well at MSU, Rizzoti struggled at GW after being moderately successful at Hartford, Stephanie White was terrible at Vandy, and there are of course plenty of others. Whalen won't be the last coach at all who gets hired on name only to underperform.