Doc Rivers Makes Delusional Claim About His Coaching 'Legacy' And How He Deserves Credit For Losing
Doc Rivers has won 1,155 games and counting as a head coach in the NBA, good enough for seventh on the all-time win list. He's also won an NBA championship, and while his résumé is mighty strong, he's also been on the wrong side of history several times.
Rivers' teams have blown 3-1 series leads in playoff series not once, but three times since he began his NBA coaching career in 1999. The first dagger came in 2003 when he was the head coach of the Orlando Magic. Rivers suffered the same fate with the Los Angeles Clippers in both 2015 and 2020 as well.
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Given his ‘record’ with 3-1 series leads is historic for all the wrong reasons, he thinks he should actually deserve credit for the wins he picked up in those series despite losing them.
"No one tells a real story," Rivers recently told Marc Spears. "And I’m fine with that. It’s unfair in some ways. I don’t get enough credit for getting the three wins. I get credit for losing. I always say, ‘What if we had lost to Houston in six?’ No one cares. One of the things that I’m proud of is we’ve never been swept. All the coaches have been swept in the playoffs. My teams achieve. A lot of them overachieve and I’m very proud of that."
"It is what it is," Rivers continued. "It’s part of my legacy. There’s nothing I can do about it."
Doc Rivers wants credit for losing. Getty Images
You can't necessarily fault Rivers for looking at his blown leads of the past from a glass-half-full perspective, but for him to claim that he deserves credit for coaching teams to almost winning playoff series is legitimately outrageous.
This is the type of thing you'd hear from a low-level coach of a bad team who hangs their hat on moral victories, not a coach making millions of dollars coaching the best basketball players on the planet.
Rivers will have a chance to write new, positive history with the Milwaukee Bucks this postseason, but if they lose in the first round just as they did a year ago, nobody is going to give him credit for coaching a team that may have picked off a win or two in a playoff series.