While the National Basketball League of Japan is essentially the rebranded Japan Basketball League, there's one distinguishing aspect that is different from before — it's a foreign coach-filled league.
Currently, nine of the 12 teams have foreign bench bosses in the NBL, which began under its new name this season. This is a notable change that would not have happened in the conservative, corporate team-led JBL era, which ended last year (The NBL's rival circuit, the bj-league, has consistently had many foreign coaches since its inception in 2005, including former NBA sideline supervisors Bob Hill and Bill Cartwright in recent years). In the final JBL season, four out of the eight teams had non-Japanese heads.
The nine are: Donald Beck of the Toyota Motors Alvark (United States, 38-8 team record through Sunday), Reggie Geary of the Chiba Jets (U.S., 15-31), Antonio Lang of the Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Dolphins (U.S., 23-23), Danny Yoshikawa of the Hyogo Storks (U.S., 6-40), Donte' Hill of the Tsukuba Robots (U.S., 8-38), Juan Manuel Hurtado Perez of the Levanga Hokkaido (Spain, 27-19), Zeljko Pavlicevic of the Wayakayama Trians (Croatia, 34-12), Tim Lewis of the Hitachi Sunrockers (Britain, 18-28), and Antanas Sireika of the Link Tochigi Brex (Lithuania, 28-18).