After 19 seasons of playing full time in the NBA and achieving great
success, Jason Kidd will be coaching the Brooklyn Nets next season. No, he will
not be an assistant coach, but will be the actual head coach. It didn’t take
very long for Kidd to decide what he wanted to do after playing this past
season with the New York Knicks and retiring on the same day as Grant Hill. J.
Kidd has the resume as a great player who was a pass first kind of guy, but is
he really ready for the responsibility of guiding a franchise, not on the
court, but on the sideline? It’s kind of a shock around the NBA at this point because
the Nets front office hired Kidd over more experienced guys like Lionel Hollins,
George Karl, and Brian Shaw. Indeed Kidd is a fresh face on the sideline, but can
he lead the Nets as a head coach? I
think he can at this point…
Being a head coach in the NBA can be very tough at times, and one has
to wonder how do these guys have a life outside of basketball? The truth is,
most of them don’t. The NBA is a league filled with players who don’t think
about winning or helping their team get better; coaches are responsible for
motivating and working with a variety of personalities, and getting them to buy
into what they are selling.
Coaches are the ones who usually take the fall for their team’s
performance on the court that result in winning and losing. The Brooklyn Nets
are a team that has the potential to be a serious contender right now because
they have an owner who will spend money on players and playing in New York is always
appealing for future free agents, but the coach has to bring the team together,
and I think that is what Kidd will do for this Nets team.
Kidd played against most of these guys last season, and now gets to
coach them. From an outsider looking in it may be difficult to sell most fans
on Kidd as their new head coach, but he may be the man for the job without
question. The Nets have an interesting bunch of players who may thrive under
Kidd’s leadership and idea of playing unselfish basketball. Will they? Who
knows, but a few players come to mind, who Kidd must develop relationships with
right off the bat.
Deron Williams, Joe Johnson, and Brook Lopez are the Nets franchise
players at this point. None of them has won a championship or any kind of
individual awards but all three of them have been all-stars and when you have
three all-stars on a team success should almost be a lock, and for Kidd this
job is not a rebuilding project this is a team that needs to get over the hump.
For Kidd, it’s not a bad job to start with because this team is ready to go at
this point and may add or lose a few role players, but this team also comes
with high expectations.
In order for Kidd to be successful with this group of players, he has
to turn Deron Williams into an unselfish player. Williams has had his history
with being difficult to handle, let alone coach, but if Williams cannot pull it
together and let his game evolve then Kidd may have problems.
It’s easy to assume that Kidd will fail. Some are saying he won’t last
a season and his players will turn on him, but Kidd has been that difficult
player in the past. In the prime of his career, he was a marvelous talent to
watch on the court, racking up assists and triple-doubles like no other but
behind the scenes he was player that played an unselfish game, but with a bad
attitude. It took Kidd a few years to shake off that image and he did by simply
winning.
Kidd may know what kind of pressure Deron Williams is facing with being
the face of the franchise and may get the most out of Williams who needs a
certain type of leadership and motivation that Kidd carried and played with for
19 seasons. The matching of this pair can either be awesome or disastrous. It’s
an interesting hire with a lot of questions, but a former player who was
unselfish with the rock for 19 seasons should be given the benefit of the doubt
because he may be the next great coach the NBA has ever seen. And the Brooklyn
Nets are taking a huge risk and a gamble on a guy with no coaching experience.
Taking risks is a part of life and sometimes those same risks come with great
rewards, and that’s what the Brooklyn Nets are hoping for. Peace…
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