Bobcats to Hire St. John’s Assistant Mike Dunlap

Dunlap, according to this article, has bounced around as an assistant for college programs like Arizona and Oregon before landing with St. John’s. He also spent two seasons as an assistant under George Karl and the Denver Nuggets in the late 2000s, showing he’s got experience on the professional level as well as collegiate.

All told, after Sloan withdrew his name from consideration for Charlotte’s open coaching spot, it seemed that with every day the likes of Shaw and Snyder weren’t offered the job, the more likely it was that his Airness/owner Michael Jordan might have been doing a little more that due diligence. To say that Dunlap was in any way expected, or known on any level to basketball fans in general, would be false. But that doesn’t make the hire, random and out-of-left-field as it may seem, a bad one.

The NBA is rife with coaches getting recycled again and again because of experience in the league and name recognition. In some cases, like Rick Carlisle’s hiring with the Dallas Mavericks in 2008, a known and well-travelled coach, roster, and franchise can mesh together as one in such a way that vaults all of the above into new stratospheres. Carlisle is now widely considered one of the league’s best tacticians.

But sometimes, like the Bobcats did in hiring the unknown Dunlap, a coach who seems to have a passion for the job in its most basic description, a franchise just has to get out of the cycle of the familiar and away from the usual suspects. Instead, taking a chance on resetting the whole stale operation with a fresh burst of oxygen is probably worth the risk for an organization with nowhere to go but up.