WHAT THE BUCK!
Kidd eyes Nets exit, Milwaukee job Rookie coach loses brooklyn power play
Jason Kidd doesn’t just look bad here. He looks like a bad guy, the rookie coach who has gotten so far ahead of himself after one year as an NBA coach that he now thinks he is the King of pro basketball.
SO THIS is how a good story goes this bad, this fast. Jason Kidd, who played the Nets into two straight NBA Finals when they were still in Jersey, retired as a player just one year ago and almost immediately became their coach.
Only now comes a different kind of story, about Kidd wanting to be the one to run the basketball operation with the Nets or at least have a lot more to say about personnel than he does, even at the expense of Billy King, the general manager who hired Kidd in the first place. It all starts to sound like “Mad Men,” and fair enough, because if this is all true, Jason Kidd now makes basketball fans of the city very mad indeed.
Kidd doesn’t just look bad here, of course. He looks like a bad guy, the rookie coach who has gotten so far ahead of himself after one year as an NBA coach that he now thinks he is the King of pro basketball and not LeBron James, this after winning just 44 games and just one playoff series, before getting one game off James and the Heat in the second round.
A few days after the NBA holds its draft in the Barclays Center, Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn, a place where pro basketball was played much better than it was at Madison Square Garden this season, it comes out that the coach of the Nets, Kidd, is already talking to the Bucks about coaching their team or maybe even running it, some of the reports even saying that the Nets and Bucks are discussing compensation.
No one will be terribly surprised. Basketball fans around here know how Kidd got into it this past season with Lawrence Frank, his top assistant and a former coach of the Nets, and how before long Frank had been vaporized. It was thought at the time that Kidd, one of the truly great point guards in NBA history and one of the great in- game, on- court thinkers, was resentful about the notion that he needed somebody holding his hand.
Who knows how he got to where he is now. Maybe Kidd looked at the Nets current situation, with enough players on the team old enough to ride the bus for half- price and with no first- round draft choices for the immediate future, and decided his own future didn’t look nearly as bright as it did when he took the job.
There are a lot of moving pieces to a story like this, and different agendas at work. But know this: The Nets aren’t likely to get much better with the players they have. They have a general manager in King who has won one playoff series since he has been in charge. They have a weird, rich, absentee owner. And they are as desperate for attention as the Jets used to be when they were signing guys like Tim Tebow.
Understand: It doesn’t mean Kidd looks good here if he did make this kind of power grab, or any less of an ingrate if he tried to big- foot the guy who hired him. He is going to get banged around. But he is used to that. It has happened before, with good reason. There were charges of domestic violence when he was with the Suns, and you better believe that helped Rod Thorn get him to the Nets in the first place.
And the whole world knows he wrapped his SUV around a tree in the Hamptons after a night of hard partying and was lucky he didn’t kill himself and kill other people in the process. That is why he began his coaching career suspended.
He takes the weight for that, and for the way things ended with Lawrence Frank. Now he is about to get it again, bigger than ever. Maybe the moment Kidd talked to somebody in Brooklyn about having more input in player personnel — or actually wanting to be the boss of basketball — it gave King or somebody else with the Nets an opening to make him look this bad and shove him in the direction of the Bucks or somebody else, and good riddance to him.
Jason Kidd knows he will get cut very little slack around here. He has made terrible decisions in his life, they’re all on the record, and now it looks as if he has made another. He was never a media darling as a player and he sure wasn’t one as a coach and nobody is likely to cut him much slack today.
The Nets may be happy to get rid of him, as early as today, if that’s how this plays out. But you have to know that if that is the way it does play out, if he is already on his way out the door, whether he ends up running the show in Milwaukee or not, he may be just as happy to get away from them.