Increasing the winning percentage is a common goal for each head coach in National Basketball Association (NBA). Understanding the strategic deploy of the team and providing appropriate incentive to motivate each player are crucial to achieve this goal. In this study, we argue that teams with head coaches with experience in team management have better performance than those without. Managerial experiences may enhance ones’ ability to see the whole picture of tactic planning as well as to understand each player and maintain better interpersonal relationship. In addition, we investigate whether or not salary disparities are related to winning percentage of the teams. Greater disparity may be the result of heroism but discourages team morale. Our argument is unique in the aspect that existing literatures emphasize the impact of characteristics of head coach on team performance; such as ages, tenures, and experiences as ball players, but not the experience as team manager. Employing data from Basketball Reference from Sportrac for season 2012/2013 to 2016/2017, panel ordinary least square methods with Hausman test are performed for analyses. Our findings suggest that managerial experience of head coaches is significantly positive related to team performance. Secondly, salary disparities are not related to team performance. This finding is consistent with that of Berri and Jewell (2004) but somewhat different from that of Frick, Prinz and Winkelmann (2003).

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