The day after the Qingdao men's basketball team hired Liu Weiwei to coach, another CBA team officially announced the change of coach, and Zhou Jinli, who has coached the Sichuan men's basketball team for nearly 3 seasons, is no longer the team's head coach. With the CBA frequently changing coaches in the past month or so, there have been new head coaches in recent years, and the only one who has not been replaced in the entire CBA in the past 8 years is Only Guangdong head coach Du Feng (Ningbo, which just entered the CBA last season, is a special case due to the short time).
In the past 8 years, too many teams in the CBA have changed their head coaches, such as Shanghai, Tianjin, Fujian, Tongxi and other teams. At the same time, Liaoning, Beijing, Xinjiang and other championship teams have also experienced head coach changes, and Liaoning, which has just won the second championship in team history in the 2021-22 season, agreed to the resignation of meritorious coach Guo Shiqiang after the resumption of the 2019-20 season, and finally stood on the top again under the leadership of Yang Ming. Even the Bayi men's basketball team, which withdrew from the CBA in the 2020-21 season, has experienced Wang Zhizhi replacing Adi Jiang as coaching.
Only Du Feng has stood firm in these 8 years. In the past 8 years, except for the promotion to guangdong head coach in the 2017-18 season due to the difficulty of coaching the men's basketball team as the head coach of Guangdong, Du Feng has been the real head coach of Guangdong all other times, which does not include Du Feng's departure from Guangdong in the second half of the 2012-13 season after Li Chunjiang left Guangdong, Du Feng was promoted to Guangdong head coach that season, and continued to serve as Guangdong head coach in the 2013-14 season (actually playing Guangdong assistant coach, assisting Yunas).
A very important reason why Guangdong can cooperate with Du Feng for such a long time is of course Du Feng's leading achievements and ability. Especially after returning to Guangdong from the national team for the first three seasons, Du Feng led Guangdong to complete the triple championship again, and created a rapid attack and defense system that was imitated by many opponents, which is the best proof of his ability upgrade. In the 2016-17 season, Du Feng also led Guangdong back to the finals after 4 seasons.
In addition to leading the team, Du Feng also successfully completed the replacement of the old and new for Guangdong during the team leadership. Ren Junfei, who was only an ordinary rotation in Guangdong before, was built by Du Feng into a regular player of the national team and the main force in Guangdong, when Zhu Fangyu, Wang Shipeng, Chen Jianghua retired, Liu Xiaoyu, Dong Hanlin, Li Yuanyu and other old subordinates in Guangdong left the team, Du Feng introduced Zhao Rui for Guangdong. After trading Gao Shang, Yang Jinmeng and others, Du Feng has dug up new talents such as Hu Mingxuan, Xu Jie, Du Runwang, zhang Haojia and other newcomers for Guangdong in recent seasons. Among them, Zhao Rui, Hu Mingxuan and Xu Jie have all become national players under the cultivation of Du Feng, and have begun to share more pressure for the two veterans Yi Jianlian and Zhou Peng, and Guangdong has been able to smoothly achieve a transition in these years with limited introduction of local strong reinforcements.
The results of leading the team in the later stage of coaching are obvious to all, and even no one can compare, in the early stage of coaching, as a young marshal, he has obtained Guangdong's vigorous training and sufficient fault tolerance time, which also makes Du Feng the best CBA coach who contributed greatly to Guangdong during his player period, and has always been the only candidate for Guangdong head coach in these years.
But Du Feng in Guangdong is not without doubts, nor has he had the opportunity to change hands. In the semi-finals of the 2013-14 season and the fourth game of the "Beijing-Guangdong War", the young Du Feng was ordered to lead the Guangdong men's basketball team to victory over Beijing on the road and was praised for leading the Guangdong men's basketball team to defeat Beijing on the road, and dragged the series to the fifth game of the life-and-death battle (the fifth game was lost), which has since been recognized by the Guangdong senior management and truly took over the command of the Guangdong head coach in the 2014-15 season. However, due to the fact that the first two seasons of the team were stopped in the semi-finals, Du Feng also encountered widespread doubts, and was even shouted "off class" by many Guangdong fans at the Guangdong home stadium.
"The Internet (fans) say that I am a 'poisonous bee', and if the 'poisonous bee' does not leave Hongyuan for a day, Hongyuan will never have a day. There was a game at that time, more than 10,000 spectators at home, many people were shouting 'Du Feng got out of class'... That feeling is only known if you have experienced it. Du Feng once said so.
When he left the men's basketball team in the 2018 offseason to return to Guangdong, there were many teams that wanted Du Feng to coach, but only because of his feelings for Guangdong and the return of trust in Guangdong investors for so many years, Du Feng still chose to return to Guangdong to coach. Even in order to lead Guangdong to win the championship in the 2018-19 season, Du Feng, who took the initiative to find a team owner to report to replace foreign aid at the end of the season (the introduction of Marzan Brooks and Beasley), also made a military order to "win the championship", and in the end, Du Feng and Guangdong were able to return to the peak, and this giant team that had been questioned in the early years was also re-emerging under the shape of Du Feng.
Can coach a team for many years, and the head coach of the first CBA giant, in addition to the unconditional trust and support of the team itself, it is obvious that the head coach himself has excellent ability. In addition to using double small foreign aid to open a new trend in the CBA, Du Feng has also made great contributions to Guangdong over the years. Let the foreign aid feel the atmosphere of home in Guangdong, adjust the cheerful Zhao Rui into a more mature team leader, let Hu Mingxuan stay away from the game and upgrade to the finals MVP... These are du Feng's painstaking efforts and credits. In order to improve Guangdong's record, Du Feng, who faced various attacks, digested his own doubts and took medicine to help sleep and condition his body in the perennial high-pressure rhythm, so he was much more vicissitudes than in the past.
Du Feng has always been a perfectionist, which can be seen from the details of his years of coaching Guangdong and his strict requirements for player training and life, which also put him under great pressure. Fortunately, Du Feng's efforts will eventually pay off, and in the next many years, he will still be in charge of the coaching whip of the Guangdong men's basketball team, and will also catch up with the coaching record created by his predecessors.