Before I begin, I have to admit I wasn’t that big of a fan of the Brooklyn Nets this season. It seems like they have so much potential to be a great team and make solid moves but I always felt like they let me down. There haven’t been much moves the Nets have done this season that I agree with but the hire of Jason Kidd is just plain bizarre.
It seems like when the Nets make a mistake they try to make another move to cover up the mistake. Last summer Dwight Howard was on the trading block. Whoever had the best offer could have him. Dwight even said that he wanted to be in Brooklyn (and I believe he still does). The Nets had all the pieces in place to make a move. A young big man who could take Dwight’s place (Brook Lopez) in Orlando and a rookie with tons of potential to get buckets (MarShon Brooks). Anybody else on the team was up for grabs also and teams like this could care less about draft picks as they could have definitely sent a few Orlando’s way. I mean come on, the Nets gave up the draft pick that eventually became last year’s Rookie of the Year Damian Lillard for Gerald Wallace!
The point is the Nets should of got the deal done, hands down! Instead they let the Lakers work out a crazy deal that left the Magic in full rebuild mode. So instead of getting Howard, the Nets made a trade for the over priced Joe Johnson. Obviously money ain’t a thing in Brooklyn because this guy is getting paid. Next they give Gerald Wallace and Kris Humphries huge multi-year contracts (making them very hard to trade). Like I said, money ain’t a thing in Brooklyn. Of course they got Deron Williams to resign (solid move but honestly he wasn’t going anywhere) and thought that old man J-Kidd would be signing alongside Williams. Instead Kidd went to the New York Knicks out of nowhere.
That’s not even when the real problems started. The Nets had a nice team on paper (all they did was resign their starters from the last year and trade for Joe Johnson, but whatever) and a pretty solid coach in Avery Johnson. Avery led the Mavericks to the Finals way back in 2006 and is a former player himself. He coached the Nets back when they were in New Jersey and had made the transition over to Brooklyn. Things seemed good, they filled out the bench on decent contracts, Jay-Z promoted them to the fullest and the season started off pretty well for the Nets. Things were going great as the team was 11-4 and Avery Johnson winning coach of the month for back to back months. Then the Nets started to struggle, the stars weren’t playing up to their standards and the team fell in the standings in December. The team soon had a 14-14 record and Avery Johnson was fired.
It happened out of nowhere and I think we can all agree it was pretty harsh and quick. Knowing they messed up the team, they named assistant coach P.J. Carlesimo as head coach for the rest of the season. The Nets did pretty well for the rest of the season and finished with the fourth seed in the playoffs. They played a pretty good series against the the injury plagued Chicago Bulls but lost. The Bulls were so banged up it wasn’t even funny but the Nets fully armed lost in a Game 7 on their own floor. Yeah that’s embarrassing. Once again, the stars didn’t play up to their standards again and guess what happened? P.J. gets informed that he won’t be back as head coach next year.
Now that brings us to where we are today as the Brooklyn Nets have found their new head coach in Jason Kidd. Jason Kidd has just recently come off one of the worst stretches in his career, having not scoring a single point in almost a month. He did the right thing and decided to call it a career. Now not even a month later he’s going to be head coach of an NBA team. It’s really odd, the same guys he’s about to coach are the same one’s he competed against last year in the Knicks-Nets battle for New York supremacy.
I’m not saying that Kidd won’t be a good coach, I mean the guy is a Hall of Fame point guard who led an extremely weak New Jersey Nets team to the Finals twice a decade ago (seems like forever). Point Guards are the ones who lead the team and are supposed to be the coach on the floor and Kidd was one of the best to ever do that. I just think its weird that they signed someone with no head coaching experience and fresh out of retirement. I thought we wouldn’t be seeing Jason Kidd for a little while after his retirement but now it looks like he’ll be sticking around for a little while longer. Maybe being an assistant coach would of been a smarter move. I really wonder how this one will go. I’m calling it like this: either it’s going to go very well or become a complete disaster. There won’t any in between.
Nets, here’s your coach:
