I'd say that Bones & Skip were pretty obviously the best motivators. Just as obviously, Tacy & Odom were the best bench coaches....and since Odom prepped under and was basically an extension of Tacy....Carl Tacy was pretty much in a class by himself as far as being the best bench coach.
Personally, I think that Tacy was the best coach we have ever had, for really a couple of reasons. 1) He had to start from scratch & operate during the peak years of ACC strength while under the biggest competitive disadvantages as far as staff, budget, facilities, etc. went. 2) He was here for 13 years, during which time he took two completely different teams with no overlapping personnel to the Elite Eight. So Tacy's success was not dependent upon any 1 or 2 players, as was Bones' (Chappell & Packer) or Odom (Duncan & Childress...and Rogers) or Skip (Howard & Paul).
Bones unquestionably reached the highest pinnacle of success among WF coaches but had the shortest tenure of success. Under Bones, WF made 5 straight ACCT finals, won two ACC Championships, made an Elite Eight, then made the only Final Four in the school history. The obvious question regarding Bones is this: What would he have been able to do if Len Chappell & Billy Packer had not decided to come to Wake? His star faded very quickly after those two guys left.
Dave Odom was a coach who got his start as Tacy's assistant. However, his teams tended to play more deliberately than Tacy's teams on the offensive end. Defensively, they were very similar. As I said earlier, I think both of these guys were outstanding bench coaches who were capable of getting maximum results from the players they had. But where would Odom have been without Tim Duncan falling into his lap?
It's very hard to rate just where Skip should be on that list, because it is virtually impossible for WF people to make independent judgments about him without being influenced by his tragic & untimely death. That seems to have made it impossible to separate Skip the person from Skip the coach. Personally, I think that Skip was quite possibly the best example of a person of anyone who has ever been associated with Wake Forest in the school's history. The way he bonded with the students & the renewed excitement about the basketball program that he generated from them was unparalleled in the school's history....with Bones McKinney being the only other coach WF has had who might be comparable. The other side of that coin is that those tremendous positives, along with his tragic premature death, seem to have made it difficult for many to accept that he was only a very average coach who had an undistinguished record in the post-season....particularly when his teams were playing against favored opponents. Who knows what would have happened if he had lived? Many have forgotten that there were rumblings after the 8-24 ACC record with 11th & 12th place finishes in 2006 & 2007. Solid programs just don't go from 13-3 to 3-13 in the conference in back-to-back years. I think it's obvious that his future at WF would have depended on what he was able to do with the tremendously hyped (and later found to be tremendously overrated) "AT&T" class of Aminu, Woods & Walker. Also, Skip was extremely fortunate...to say the least...that he had two of the better players in WF history that happened to be "homegrown" and fell into his lap because they just wanted to stay local and play at WF. Where would Skip have been without Josh Howard & Chris Paul? We saw what happened after Chris Paul left.