It’s said that hiring a new coach is like getting a new romantic partner. The last girlfriend was too bossy? Find somebody more chill. Oh, he didn’t have a job? Get a get a guy with a steady paycheck. In other words, find the opposite of the last one.

It’s easy to see how this plays out in the NFL. A defensive-minded coach who couldn’t get through to the quarterback is fired and replaced with an offensive-leaning coach with a reputation of being a “quarterback whisperer.” Then maybe the defense can’t stop anyone so that coach is fired for a former defensive assistant. And so on.

The same tic-tac-toe happens in the NBA, but it’s harder to categorize. Rarely are coaches neatly sorted into “offensive” or “defensive” houses in basketball, so a team lacking in defense can’t necessarily peg the top defensive coordinator as its new coach. I probably don’t have to point this out, but basketball coaches have to run the offense and the defense because of how often possession changes.

Still, the NBA has its own version of the partner pattern. Instead of “offensive” and “defensive” labels, we can categorize most coaches as “motivators” and “tacticians.” When one fails, NBA teams tend to hire the other.

For instance, Doc Rivers. Motivator. Nick Nurse. Tactician. Rivers – widely regarded as a coach capable of motivating stars – failed to lift the 76ers last season and was replaced by Nurse – widely regarded as one of the more forward-looking schemers in the league.

Let’s go through a few more recent coaching changes:

Hawks: Nate McMillan, motivator, out. Quin Snyder, tactician, in.

Rockets: Stephen Silas, tactician, out. Ime Udoka, motivator, in.

Bucks: Mike Budenholzer, tactician, out. Adrian Griffin, motivator, in.

Suns: Monty Williams, motivator, out. Frank Vogel, tactician, in.

Raptors: Nurse, tactician, out. Darko Rajakovic, motivator, in.

This isn’t to say that Monty Williams isn’t capable of drawing up a sick SLOB or that Quin Snyder won’t be able to motivate Trae Young to play defense (can anyone?!), just like NFL defensive coordinators can probably call a play on offense. But these are specialties. The best coaches are obviously great motivators and tacticians and, therefore, harder to categorize. But we’re not talking about Erik Spoelstra and Steve Kerr right now.

Eight teams enter the 2023-24 season with a different coach from the one they had at the start of last season. One thing we know is there will be more turnover over the next 12 months. The likes of Jason Kidd (Dallas), Billy Donovan (Chicago) and Chauncey Billups (Portland) are all sitting on warming seats.

Should Billups get fired, you already know the prototype that will replace him. Some young hotshot who probably spent some time diagraming plays in the G League is praised for his ability to get through to young players and looks a little bit like Brad Stevens.

The pattern is predictable, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong. If the old-school coach who emphasizes sprints in practice more than the analytics department doesn’t work out, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to replace him with another coach who does the same thing. Similar patterns can be seen with presidents and CEOs.

Two of the most successful coaches of this century, Spoelstra and Kerr, had their head coaching careers born out of this pattern. Spoelstra, of video room lore, took over for former player and legendary badass Pat Riley. Kerr took over for the silver-tongued Mark Jackson, arriving from the TNT broadcast booth with big ideas of how to utilize Steph Curry, famously diagraming his offense at a wine bar in the Oakland Airport.

Spoelstra and Kerr started their careers as savvy tacticians, but evolved into experts in player motivation. It’s possible to find you a coach who can do both.

But those coaches are rare and, like players, need the right context to thrive. As organizations search for their Spoelstra or Kerr, they’ll do it by following the same predictable pattern: Hire what the former coach wasn’t.