KENNY GONE IN SHOCKER!
Atkinson, like Jackson with Warriors, won’t get the chance to finish job
Before the Golden State Warriors became a dynasty, rattling off three championships in a four-year span, they had to make an unpopular decision. It was the same decision the Brooklyn Nets made when they “parted ways” with head coach Kenny Atkinson early Saturday morning — the season after giving him a contract extension — with just 20 games left in the regular season.
Mark Jackson was a revered head coach who had developed Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green into All-Star caliber players. Jackson’s Warriors, like Atkinson’s Nets, got better every year, improving from 23 wins his first season into a playoff team over the next two seasons with a second-round appearance in his second season and then a 51-season.
But Jackson’s offensive system lacked creativity, and his team was ousted in the first round of the 2014 NBA Playoffs. He was fired shortly after, and replaced by rookie head coach Steve Kerr.
Kerr won a championship the following season, then two more in the three seasons after. He is still the Warriors’ head coach and projects to hold onto the job as long as he chooses.
That is the hope the Nets have: maximizing their threeyear title window of the Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving era. Finding a new voice that resonates with the players and can lead this franchise to Brooklyn’s first-ever NBA championship, then captain the ship in the years that follow.
That voice did not belong to Kenny Atkinson. For at least 20 games, it will belong to interim head coach Jacque Vaughn — but even he isn’t high on his odds of retaining the job beyond this season.
Nets GM Sean Marks said this was not an abrupt decision, rather the byproduct of an ongoing conversation that had spanned two or three months. He said Atkinson admitted his voice wasn’t landing with the players the same way it had in the past.
“Kenny is brutally honest, and the humility he showed to say he’ll admit, ‘My voice is not what it once was here. It’s time.’ And we had that discussion,” Marks said in a press conference on Saturday. “I give him a lot of credit for that, when he sits there and goes, ‘It’s time. Whether my voice is lost or they’re not engaging me like they should, that’s where we are in this conversation.’ But there wasn’t one specific event.”
Atkinson just became a casualty of the modern NBA, just like D’Angelo Russell, and just like several of the players who the head coach has been developing. Those players may find their way out the door this summer as the Nets piece together a championship roster. Nothing is off the table, and the players understand that.
“The goal is a championship,” Spencer Dinwiddie said. “I think [Marks] is going to do the best that he can to build a championship-quality roster; staff, chef, ball boys, everything. It’s everything.
He’s going to do what he feels is in the best interests of the Nets.”
It appears management wasn’t only evaluating players who fit with Durant and Irving. It’s impossible they made this decision without consulting the best players on the team.
Marks spoke in circles when asked if players had any input on the decision to change gears. He said Durant and Irving factored into the decision “the same way all 17 players on the roster factored” into the decision.
Caris LeVert, Dinwiddie and Joe Harris were taken aback by the news — they were alerted via a group text from Marks Saturday morning.
But the Nets adopted a Beyond Meat sponsorship immediately after signing Irving and DeAndre Jordan, who both serve as ambassadors for the company. If Irving and Durant would have backed Atkinson, he would still have his job.
“I would have loved to see him coach those guys. There’s no question of that,” Marks said. “But the situation and the circumstances we’re in today is we’re trying to take this program from where we are now to another level, and we’ve both agreed along with ownership that a change is necessary at this time to do that.”
Instead, Atkinson never got the chance to coach Durant and only had Irving for 20 games this season. Marks said he and Atkinson came to a mutual agreement after discussions about the progress of the season.
What kind of progress did the front office expect with an injury-riddled roster that lacked two players who make up 54% of the payroll?
“What we’re looking at is did the team progress? Did guys develop? Did guys really take advantage of their opportunities and so forth?” Marks said. “So there’s a lot of things that go into that. Whether that’s coaching, system, style, relationships, you name it, all of the above. Kenny’s worked and done a heckuva job on all of that.
“Again, it goes back to he’s gotten us to this place, right now and with mutual discussions between the two of us, we both decided that it’s time to move on.”
Irving also expected more progress from young players when he first returned from the shoulder impingement that sidelined him from Nov. 14 to Jan. 12.
“We need a lot more teaching. We need a lot more teaching to be done, specifically for kind of our younger year players,” he said after the Jan. 12 win over the Hawks. “We’re just continuing to build what the Brooklyn Nets culture is. I think that’s yet to be defined. We have a chance to define it with the guys in our locker room here.
“Obviously we play hard, but culture here is we want to be a championship-level organization, and we want to do that for the next few years. That’s competing and when I’m done playing basketball that this culture here will still be consistent. And that’s what I’m after.”
That culture does not include Atkinson. There’s a strong chance it won’t include several players on this year’s roster.
“I think the debate is also going to be how does Spencer, Joe, Caris, and everybody else fit in?” Marks said. “Because there’s a lot of things going on there. I don’t want to single out how Kevin and Ky fit. I think this is a sum of its parts and how they all fit together.”
Now Marks just has to hope his tough decision leads to a title.