[Cactus Jack]

Here's an affordable name with NBA experience that will never happen in our lifetime: former Spurs assistant and current coach of the defending back-to-back WNBA champion Aces, Becky Hammon. I think she currently makes ~$750K per year.

Let's be honest with ourselves here: take away the fact that she's a woman and she'd have been given many more opportunities.

Good hire for the UK women's team which is open.

She'd be taking a huge paycut and leaving a professional team for college. I think she gets a chance to be a head coach in the men's game at some point. She's too successful not to.

Here are some names in the Greg Popovich coaching tree: Steve Kerr, Mike Budenholzer, Michael Malone, Ime Udoka, and Monty Williams. If you've watched the NBA Finals in almost any of the past five or so years, you've seen them as the head coach, and three of them won it all.

Scratch that, on merit alone, she's extremely overqualified compared to most college coaches.

Never happen. That's not sexist but women can't tell men how to play basketball. I'm totally on board with giving her $1 MM to coach UK women though. And she will probably still be playing every year after Cal gets bounced.

I don't know about that. Gregg Popovich doesn't seem like the type to carry around dead-weight or favor hires. I'm sure it wasn't a decision that everyone in the organization just rubber-stamped either. I think she'd coached the Spurs during the summer league one season and Popovich and others in the organization spoke highly of her.

I will say that I think some coaches are meant to coach college and others professionally. There's a reason that Larry Brown is the only coach to win a title at both levels. It looks like she would rather be at the professional level than the collegiate level.

IMO, the only reason Hammon would have to consider a college job is to break some of the glass ceilings and work twice as hard to get to where she could go than a man would. In terms of just X's and O's & basketball knowledge, she'd probably run circles around the majority of coaches in the NCAA.

Let's be real: Popovich is right there with Pat Riley and Phil Jackson when it comes to the most successful and well-regarded coaches from the 80's forward. I don't know who else you would definitively put ahead of him other than those two. He's won five NBA championships for a small market team and at one time had seven of his protgees filling head coaching roles in the NBA at the same time. If he thinks she's valuable enough to fill one of his few assistant slots with during two of their title runs and trust the summer league team to her, then that's kind of a big deal and more than enough for me.

As far as things like negative recruiting might go against her, I would imagine that another coach talking about "getting to the league" wouldn't carry nearly as much weight as the actual wisdom and insight that she could offer given that she had, you know, actually done it as both a player, assistant coach, and head coach. Basically, if she weren't a woman, she'd be something like what the opposition would have worried about if someone like a Penny Hardaway or Jerry Stackhouse also had professional coaching experience and was really able to take off.