NBA

Kidd thought Frank was undermining him with players: source

Jason Kidd sat down at the podium for his pregame press conference Tuesday evening, paused for a moment and sighed.

Then he delivered a piece of news no one would have expected just a few short months, or even weeks, ago: Lawrence Frank will no longer be around the Nets on a daily basis.

“Lawrence has been reassigned to doing daily reports and he won’t be sitting on the bench or at practice,” Kidd said Tuesday before the Nets lost to the Nuggets, 111-87, at Barclays Center. “There’s the change. It doesn’t change the coaching staff. Guys will still be there sitting on the bench.

“That’s that.”

“That” is just the latest in a series of remarkable twists and turns this franchise has gone through just since training camp began in October. Frank, Kidd’s former head coach with the Nets, was lobbied hard to join the coaching staff this summer to help the rookie coach make the immediate transition from playing to coaching.

Frank was fired as head coach of the Pistons after last season, with Detroit agreeing to pay him the final $3.7 million he had remaining on the final year of his deal. The Nets gave Frank a six-year deal worth roughly $6 million that pays $1 million in the first season, making him the NBA’s highest paid assistant coach, with the possibility of transitioning into the front office in the future.

A league source said Frank was assigning tasks to fellow assistants — traditionally a responsibility of the head coach — and it didn’t sit well with other members of Kidd’s staff.

Another source said the relationship between the two had gotten to the point where Kidd felt he was being undermined by Frank with players and assistant coaches on the staff.

Kidd said no one will replace Frank, and the remaining coaches — John Welch, Roy Rogers, Joe Prunty, Eric Hughes and Charles Klask — will remain in their current roles.

“There’s a lot of moving parts around here, and we are trying to adjust to it,” Kevin Garnett said after the game. “That’s how I am going to answer that.”

Kidd was asked if the decision to remove Frank had anything to do with a personal situation, given Frank had missed some time during the preseason to deal with a personal matter, but made it clear the decision was for professional reasons.

“No, it’s just different philosophies,” Kidd said. “That’s all.”

When Kidd was asked whether the Nets’ defensive struggles this season — they entered Tuesday’s game 29th in defensive rating, according to NBA.com — he repeated a similar refrain.

“No, it’s just different philosophies, and that’s it,” he said. “We’ll figure out how to stop people.”

When Kidd was hired in June, it was with the expectation he would build an experienced staff around him, and both he and the Nets pursued Frank to be a key piece of that staff.

“I’ve always respected Coach Frank,” Kidd said at Yankee Stadium in June. “He’s the reason I’ve kind of publicly recruited him, because I really need him and want him. I guess I’m kind of that college recruiter right now, because he brings a lot to the table.

“He’s had success here, understands the good and bad and, so, again, I’m recruiting him to come join my staff.”

The expectation was Kidd would lean on both Frank and former Nuggets assistant Welch, whom he had also lured to Brooklyn, to be his de-facto defensive and offensive coordinators, respectively.

Kidd told The Post during summer league he would like to replicate the system Larry Bird had during his three-year run of success as Pacers head coach.

“Lawrence is great,” Kidd said. “He has the total package. He’s been an assistant. He’s been a head coach. You look at John [Welch], he’s been around one of the best that’s done it in George Karl, and if you look around he’s been with [longtime NBA assistant Tim Grgurich], he’s been at UNLV and Fresno State with [Jerry Tarkanian], so he knows what it takes to be successful.

“We’re talking this week and I’m trying to share the vision I have, and that’s one of the formulas that we might have — break it down where [Frank] could do defense and John does the offense and I’ll oversee and pipe in on both.”

That seems to have changed, however. Asked if someone would assume Frank’s role, and whether Welch would remain mostly in charge of the offense — he was the coach who drew up the final play during “Cupgate” last week — Kidd cut the question off.

“We’ll be coaches,” he said. “That’s the way it’ll be. No one doing offense, no one doing defense. We’ll take the responsibility of being coaches. That will be the way it’s set up.”

It was clear something happened in recent weeks between Kidd and Frank to cause Kidd to make the change. Asked if recent reports of “friction” between he and Frank had anything to do with it, Kidd again went back to it being about different philosophies.

“This is my decision, and in a sense, what I had to do,” Kidd said. “It’s about basketball. That’s it.”

— Additional reporting by Fred Kerber