Spiraling Nets fire Vaughn days after 50-point defeat
The Nets have fired head coach Jacque Vaughn amid their disappointing season, the team announced Monday.
At 21-33, the Nets entered the All-Star break in 11th place in the Eastern Conference and 2.5 games out of the final spot in the NBA’s play-in tournament.
Brooklyn has lost 18 of its last 24 games, including by a whopping 50 points to the Boston Celtics last week in what marked the second-largest defeat in the Nets’ 57-year history. That brutal blowout ended up being Vaughn’s final game.
The Nets are turning to assistant Kevin Ollie to be their interim head coach, a source confirmed to the Daily News. Ollie, who is in his first season with Brooklyn, spent six seasons as the head coach at UConn, where he won the NCAA Tournament in 2014.
Brooklyn’s next game is scheduled to take place Thursday in Toronto against the Raptors.
This is the second season in a row the Nets made a midseason coaching change. Vaughn, who joined Brooklyn as an assistant in 2016, took over as head coach in November 2022 after the team fired Steve Nash seven games into last season. Brooklyn then signed Vaughn, 49, last February to a multi-year extension through the 2026-27 season.
“This was an incredibly difficult decision, but one we feel is in the best interest of the team going forward,” Nets general manager Sean Marks said in a statement Monday. “Jacque has represented this organization with exemplary character and class for the past eight years. The consistent positivity and passion he poured into our team daily will remain with the players and staff he interacted with throughout his tenure.”
Vaughn helped the Nets overcome a 2-5 start in 2022-23 and led them to last year’s playoffs as the East’s No. 6 seed. That team faltered, however, after trading Kyrie Irving to Dallas and Kevin Durant to Phoenix last February and was swept in the first round of the playoffs by the Philadelphia 76ers. Lacking a clear-cut superstar, the Nets entered the 2023-24 campaign hopeful to compete with their depth and versatility but have failed to establish a consistent identity, ranking 21st in scoring at 113.4 points per game and 16th on defense in allowing 115.6 points per game.
The Nets began the season 12-9 and, as recently as late December, owned a .500 record at 15-15. But the team has spiraled since, beginning with a Dec. 27 loss at home to Milwaukee in which the Nets sat Cam Johnson, Nic Claxton, Spencer Dinwiddie and Dorian Finney-Smith for the second game of a backto-back. The team was later fined $100,000 for violating the league’s Player Participation Policy.
That night kicked off the first of four separate losing streaks of at least three games for the Nets in under two months. The season hit a low point Wednesday in Brooklyn’s 136-86 loss to a short-handed Celtics team that was without second-leading-scorer Jaylen Brown and sixth man Al Horford.
“We have some work to do,” Vaughn said afterward. “We have to be OK doing the work. But I do believe this team can do the work.”
Recent losses to Durant’s Suns and Irving’s Mavericks in their first post-trade returns to Barclays Center offered reminders of how much ground the Nets must make up after breaking up their so-called superteam.
Injuries took a toll on the Nets, particularly with play-making point guard Ben Simmons, who has appeared in only 12 of a possible 54 games this season, mostly due to his latest back issues. Johnson, Claxton and Cam Thomas all missed significant time this season as well.
With the season unraveling, the Nets this month traded Dinwiddie to the Raptors, who later waived him, and reliable reserve Royce O’Neale to the Suns. The Dinwiddie trade brought back another veteran guard in Dennis Schroder.
After last week’s lopsided loss in Boston, Vaughn cited his team’s lack of continuity.
“I have total confidence in this group,” Vaughn said. “Even at halftime, believing somehow we were going to try to climb back into the game. Now, there’s going to be a level of commitment, that we have to get things sped up pretty quickly, just because these guys haven’t played together, and the different combinations. But at no point did I think, going into the game, that we would lose by this amount.”
But Mikal Bridges – the Nets’ leading scorer who joined Brooklyn a year ago in the Durant trade – offered a harsher analysis, admitting after the Celtics loss, “A lot of s–t is not right and you have to fix it.”
Vaughn also served as the Nets’ interim head coach for 10 games in 2020 after the team fired Kenny Atkinson. Vaughn finishes his Brooklyn tenure with a 71-68 record as head coach, including 64-65 since taking over last season.