The healers
As he tries to re-energize Brooklyn, Kevin Ollie’s willing to repair his side of bridge to Uconn
NEW YORK — Dan Hurley tossed out an olive branch last Saturday. It was ESPN Gameday at Uconn, Rip Hamilton’s jersey was retired, and in the joyous aftermath of a big win he saw a chance for thaw in a long, cold Husky family feud.
“The situation when Kevin (Ollie) was let go … there’s a lot of healing that’s gone on,” Hurley said. “And hopefully at some point it can heal enough to get KO back, and we wish him well with the Brooklyn Nets with this opportunity.”
No one prompted Hurley, who was served a subpoena at his home during the height of the Ollie-uconn legal fight in 2020, he just put it out there. And Ollie was willing to pick it up.
“Yeah, I hope so, I would love for it to heal,” Ollie said Thursday, before the Nets beat Atlanta 124-97 at Barclays Center in his first home game since taking over. “As I’ve said, I bleed blue. There are a lot of people that are up there, that brick and mortar didn’t do anything. At the end of the day time heals and I would love that situation to transpire. If we can do that, it would be great.”
Of course, it will take more than two for this tango to take place within the brick and mortar of Gampel Pavilion, but it’s a start.
Ollie’s looking back should be limited right now. Glance back on the good times, his stellar career as a point guard, one of the best ever to play at Uconn.
Glance back at his first season as an assistant coach, when the Huskies won five games in five days at the Big East tournament and never stopped winning in 2011.
Glance back at the moment, 10 years ago next
Tuesday, when he pulled a prediction straight out of nowhere, that the team he coached, after struggling to beat a 21-loss Rutgers team in the last home game, would come back to Gampel as national champions, which, despite going into the NCAA Tournament as a No. 7 seed, they unfathomably did.
Kevin Ollie did all that at Uconn, and for that he should have been among the Huskies of Honor before he even left the school. The bitterness of the breakup in 2018 was intense, the litigation nasty before Ollie, willing to risk the all-or-nothing legal strategy, got every penny of the $11 million plus owed on his contract, and a little more.
Both sides made their mistakes, issued harsh statements, and both sides paid a price. Uconn’s image took a hit over its treatment of Ollie, straining relationships with other distinguished basketball alums. And Ollie spent years in a coaching wilderness, working out of the spotlight at Overtime Elite. How many coaches/ managers in any sport win a championship, or even come close, then wait this many years for another chance, no matter the circumstances of their dismissal?
Enough time has passed, and there is enough room on the high ground for all. Whatever the details, Hurley was the right man to rebuild the program that had fallen off the cliff during Ollie’s last two seasons. Uconn men are national champs again, poised to make a run at repeating, and Ollie is finally repairing his career. He was expecting to “feel the spirit of Brooklyn” in his home debut in the big chair, and when the Nets started off with a 34-16 first-quarter lead, there was a heartbeat in the building.
“Coach is doing a great job giving people confidence, letting people play,” said veteran guard Dennis Schroder, who joined Brooklyn three weeks ago, “because he understands the game, he’d been around for 12, 13 years (as a player) in the league himself.”
Once again Ollie, 51, is betting on himself, looking to parlay this short stretch between replacing Jacque Vaughn at the All-star break and the end of the season into a chance to be a permanent NBA head coach, if not in Brooklyn, then somewhere. The Nets were blown out in Ollie’s first two games, at Toronto and Minnesota, but earned Ollie’s first win at Memphis on Monday, drenching him with the ice water in the locker room. They lost at Orlando Tuesday, ending the four-game, four-cities-in-six-days road trip.
“Energy and spirit is what he brings,” said forward Cam Johnson, who scored 29 against the Hawks. “And intensity. I wouldn’t say it’s a complete fresh start, but it’s definitely a different voice in some way.”
Brooklyn (23-36) is trailing the Hawks for the last of 10 playoff spots in the Eastern Conference. Reaching a play-in would perhaps be enough to convince Nets ownership to give Ollie a full season.
“The adjustment has been good, I’m just taking it day by day,” Ollie said. “There’s a lot on our plate, but I have a great coaching staff helping me, I’m able delegate some power to them, empower them to do their jobs, so it’s been great. We’re staying together, that’s what you do, try to get in the eye of the hurricane when the storm is around you. That’s the calmest place.”
Yes, the colorful metaphors, meteorological and otherwise, and familiar phrases are coming back. Ollie dropped one “share the cake” reference pregame. And he reissued his “non-negotiables,” sounding a lot like his days at Uconn.
“Non-negotiables is playing hard, being connected,” he said. “Certain situations have got us where we lost our energy, dropped down from an energy standpoint and we can’t let that happen. We’re talented, but we have to use our connectivity for our talent to win. We don’t want energy dips. Energy dips come when we lose a lead, not moving without the basketball, or the ball is not moving. So we need to share the cake, we saw it in the Memphis game, we saw portions of it in the Minnesota game. I think we’ve got enough in that locker room. We still believe and that’s what we’ve got to focus on these last 24 games.”
“So we’re just hunkering down, huddling up, keeping our guys in a good spirit, positive spirt and just focus on winning, creating winning habits. We’re not worried about the prize at the end, we’re just really trying to build a foundation here.”
Oh, we’re all well-versed in Ollie-speak, It rings true in good times, as it did in the best of times in 2014, when everyone was talking 10 toes in and bypassing escalators. In tough times, as with any coach, it can start to ring hollow in a hurry. That’s for the Brooklyn Nets to figure out.
In Connecticut, it’s time to finish the healing process of which Dan Hurley spoke. The chance to honor the 2014 champs on the 10th anniversary was lost, with so many still playing overseas, unable to get back. But it shouldn’t take until the 20th anniversary to bring the coach back to take rightful place in Huskies history.