Mandatory Credit: Brendan Maloney-USA TODAY Sports
6. Kevin Loughery: 1986-88
57-65, 2-6 playoffs
Kevin Loughery, who spent eight years with the Bullets as a player, guided Washington to a playoff appearance in his one full season as head coach. The other two years, due to various shenanigans, he only coached a combined 40 games.
Loughery was a Bullets assistant in 1985 when Gene Shue was fired with just 13 games left in the season, and Loughery was able to guide DC to a playoff spot. The next year, Loughery’s Bullets went 42-40 – they’d get swept in the first round, the Bullets would start 8-19 the next year, and Loughery was out.
Loughery also coached the Nets, Hawks, Bulls and Heat, and had the privilege of being one of two men to coach the infamous 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers team that went 9-73. Loughery coached the final 31 games, going 5-26 – he was brought aboard after Roy Rubin won just four of the Sixers’ first 51 games.
Rubin was the former head coach at Long Island University, very well respected in the collegiate ranks, who ended up getting the 76ers job after the team posted a want ad for a head coach in a local paper. Rubin never coached again after ’73, and ended up running an IHOP in Florida. Why doesn’t stuff like this happen in the NBA anymore?
5. Bernie Bickerstaff: 1997-99
77-72, 0-3 playoffs
Few men gave as much of their lives to the NBA as Bernie Bickerstaff. A coal miner’s son from Kentucky, Bickerstaff was a Bullets assistant coach for 13 years under KC Jones, Gene Shue and Dick Motta, serving as lead assistant for the Bullets’ championship team in 1978.
He later went on to head jobs with the Sonics and Nuggets, before returning as Bullets coach midway through the 1997 season, when he replaced a fired Jim Lynam and guided the Bullets to their first playoff appearance in nearly a decade. The next year, they were the Washington Wizards, and Bickerstaff did what seems utterly impossible today – he had a winning record in the East, but missed the playoffs.
After an 18-32 campaign in the strike-shortened 1999-2000 season, Bickerstaff was out, later reappearing as the first head coach of the Charlotte Bobcats and as an assistant coach for various teams up until last season. At the age of 72 and after over 40 years in the NBA, Bickerstaff’s career may be over, but he currently stands as one of just four men to have a winning record as head coach in Washington.
That’s a basketball life well spent.
4. KC Jones: 1973-76
155-91, 14-17 playoffs
KC Jones is just ludicrously successful. Not only did he win two NCAA championships alongside Bill Russell at the University of San Francisco, he got to follow his college teammate to the Boston Celtics and win eight more NBA titles as a player. He also won two NBA titles as an assistant coach (the ’72 Lakers and the ’81 Celtics) and two more as the Celtics head coach in 1984 and 1986.
He didn’t do too bad as the Bullets head coach either: he won at least 47 games in all three of his years at the helm in DC. But for better or worse, KC Jones’ career as the Bullets coach will forever be defined by what happened in 1975 – that was when the Bullets romped to a 60-22 record, but in one of the greatest disappointments in Washington sports history, fell in a stunning upset to the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals. KC Jones inherited the greatest team in this franchise’s history, but he wasn’t the man to take them to the promised land.
Fun fact: there are nine men who have won seven or more NBA titles as a player. Eight of them played for the Bill Russell-era Celtics; the other was Robert Horry. Some guys just have all the luck.
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