Scott Skiles' hiring in Orlando will have limited impact

— -- Nearly 21 years after trading him to the then-Washington Bullets, the Orlando Magic have brought back their former point guard Scott Skiles, this time in the role of coach. While it's challenging to isolate the impact of coaches, Skiles has a remarkably consistent track record in his three previous stops in the NBA -- both for better and for worse. Let's take a look.

The Skiles Bounce

Throughout his career, Skiles has had a tendency to produce immediate improvement. Here are his teams' winning percentages before and after he took over.

The effect grows even stronger if you look at Skiles' first full season in Chicago rather than 2003-04, when he took over for Bill Cartwright 16 games into a lost season. (Skiles also took over in Phoenix midway through the 1999-00 season.)

With this adjustment, Skiles' teams have improved by an incredible average of 13.6 wins from the previous year. Naturally, he doesn't deserve all the credit. Below-.500 teams will tend to improve because of the pull of parity and regression to the mean, and the 2004-05 Bulls in particular upgraded their talent massively with the additions of Sixth Man Award winner Ben Gordon and Luol Deng, both drafted in the top 10 that season.

Still, most of the difference has come at the defensive end, Skiles' specialty. Let's try that same chart with the rank in defensive rating by season.

Again, considering Skiles' first full year in Chicago, his teams have improved by an average of 14 spots defensively, going either from average to elite or worst in the league to average with remarkable consistency. By Year 2 in charge, Skiles has typically produced a top-five defense. Again, personnel has something to do with that, but considering that coaches tend to have more consistent impact at the defensive end of the court, Skiles deserves a lot of credit.

Limited Shelf Life

Here's the thing about bouncing objects: They tend to be pulled down by gravity, and such has been the case with Skiles' defensive impact. In Phoenix, Skiles was fired midway through his third season (and second full one) as coach after the team dropped to 10th in defensive rating. His Bulls team declined even more massively, going from the league's best defensive rating to 17th at the time he was fired on Christmas Eve 2007.

In Milwaukee, Skiles managed to last a fifth full season -- his longest stop as a coach -- and the Bucks did rebound to 12th in defensive rating after slipping below average in 2011-12 with Andrew Bogut limited to 12 games by injury. But Skiles' last Milwaukee team still didn't live up to its earlier defensive standard.

By all appearances, there's a shelf life on Skiles' ability to create defensive discipline with his hard-edged style, which has been by far at its most effective in his first three to four years with a team. All coaches are hired to be fired, as the expression goes, but it's particularly apt in the case of a taskmaster like Skiles.

How Skiles Fits Orlando

The Magic are probably the closest match tor the Chicago team that Skiles took over at the end of November 2003. By that point, the Bulls were five years into what had been a fruitless rebuild. Chicago had one of the league's youngest cores and was mired in the bottom 10 at both ends of the court -- not unlike Orlando, which finished 27th in offensive rating and 25th on defense a year ago.

The Magic are unlikely to enjoy the same talent infusion as the Bulls. Besides Deng and Gordon, they also added rookies Chris Duhon and Andres Nocioni, both Skiles favorites. Despite Gordon's high scoring off the bench, Chicago didn't get any better offensively -- the Bulls still ranked 26th in offensive rating in 2004-05, and never finished any better than 20th under Skiles. Yet Chicago still won 47 games thanks to an elite defense.

While the situation isn't quite as comparable, the better guide to expectations is Skiles' tenure in Milwaukee. He inherited a team that had been last in the league defensively in 2007-08 and won just 26 games -- similar to last season's Magic, who won 25 games. The Bucks improved by eight games in Skiles' first season, then 12 more in Year 2, when the "Fear the Deer" Milwaukee team made a late-season run that ended in a seven-game first-round loss.

It's not inconceivable to imagine Orlando making the playoffs next season in the Eastern Conference. More likely, however, it will take a year for Skiles to sort through the talent on hand and figure out which players fit his system. With the likes of Elfrid Payton, Victor Oladipo and Aaron Gordon drafted in the lottery the past two seasons, there are plenty of athletes who can succeed defensively if they commit under Skiles, even without a true rim protector in center Nikola Vucevic.

The question is how high the Magic can get under Skiles. His turnarounds have tended to have a ceiling. The best team of Skiles' career, the 1999-00 Suns, won 53 games, and he has won just two playoff series in his career -- never advancing past the conference semifinals. There's a longtime sacrifice to the short-term benefit of adding Skiles, and that's why I suspect the Magic will ultimately regret this hire. As satisfying as competing will be after Orlando has been the league's worst team since the Dwight Howard trade in 2012, the Magic didn't stockpile lottery picks to top out in the second round.