Leading Men

Coaches in the major sports with the most championships:

NFL

George Halas

* He coached the Chicago Bears for 40 years, winning 324 games and an NFL-record six championships. Halas won NFL titles in four decades, including three in the 1940s. His 1940 team, which defeated the Washington Redskins, 73-0, in the NFL championship game, was voted the greatest professional team of all time by the National Academy of Sports Editors in 1963.

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NBA

Red Auerbach

* Of his nine NBA titles, eight were consecutive. The Celtics began the streak in 1959. They also won in ’57. In his 16 years coaching the Celtics, his team won 10 Eastern Division titles. Auerbach was born for the pros. He spent only one season in college coaching, 1949-50, when he was an assistant at Duke.

Phil Jackson

* When he arrived to coach the Lakers, he had already taken the Chicago Bulls to six titles. He took a one-year break from coaching, then joined the Lakers in 1999-2000 and started his run of three more NBA crowns. Jackson’s route to the Bulls was via the Continental Basketball Assn., where he spent five seasons with the Albany Patroons and won a league title.

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BASEBALL

Casey Stengel

* His seven World Series titles were accomplished in 12 seasons with the New York Yankees, and in those 12 seasons, the Yankees won 10 American League pennants.

Joe McCarthy

* Of his seven World Series titles, this Hall of Famer managed a streak of four in a row with the 1936-39 Yankees. In his years as manager of the Yankees, Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox, his teams never finished out of the first division, but all his World Series titles came as manager of the Yankees.

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NHL

Scotty Bowman

* He broke his longtime tie with Montreal legend Toe Blake when he won his ninth Stanley Cup title with the Detroit Red Wings in 2002. Bowman won three titles with Detroit, five with Montreal and one with Pittsburgh. After his final title in Detroit, Bowman announced quietly to team officials, on the ice during the postgame celebration, that he had coached his last game.