ORLANDO — One phrase Jason Kidd has repeated over and over as he has prepared to make his coaching debut in the NBA Summer League is the whole experience is like “summer school” for him.
It didn’t take him long to get his first lesson yesterday, as Kidd was nailed with a technical foul for leaving the coaches’ box late in the fourth quarter of the Nets’ 76-67 loss to the Pistons in the first of five games the Nest will play this week.
“It’s a lesson learned,” Kidd said, before adding with a smile, “and I know I can’t go past half court.”
It was the first lesson in what will have to be a steep learning curve for Kidd, who only retired from a brilliant 19-year Hall of Fame playing career a little more than a month ago, and is still understandably adjusting to his new role.
“I’m learning,” Kidd said. “As a coach, you’re going to learn every day from the good and bad. My job, come training camp, is to get settled with the guys we have on the team … every coach in this league, I think, learns every day from a game. Once you know everything as a coach, you tend to retire and do something else.
He will also understandably lean on his lead assistant, Lawrence Frank, his former coach when he was a Net, as he did throughout yesterday’s game. Frank often was the one holding the clipboard during the coaching staff huddles during timeouts, with Kidd then usually delivering whatever message the coaching staff came up with to his players. On a couple of occasions, Frank himself drew up a play for the players to run. Kidd has said he will draw up his own plays, and attributed not doing it at times yesterday to the fact timeouts in summer league are 30 seconds shorter than during a regular-season NBA game.
Point guard Tyshawn Taylor said the two coaches seemed to split the responsibilities in half.
“Coach Frank is a mastermind when it comes to drawing up plays and things like that,” said Taylor, who had 17 points and four rebounds. “I think Coach Kidd was talking to us mostly about defense, and when it came to the offensive stuff that we had to work on, Coach Frank would do it.”
Although he did pick up the technical foul late in the game, Kidd spent much of the 40 minutes of game action sitting in his seat on the bench, directing traffic, only occasionally getting out of his seat to have what seemed more like a casual conversation than an argument with the referees.
Kidd also raised a few eyebrows by having his players repeatedly intentionally foul Pistons center Andre Drummond late in the fourth quarter as the Nets were trying get back into the game, the kind of tactic that usually isn’t employed in a low-stakes situation like summer league.
“It’s part of the game,” he said. “I wanted to see how we handled the situation. This is summer league, so you have to put guys in different situations and it was a ball game.”
Drummond, who finished the game 2-for-9 from the foul line, pointed over at Frank — his coach last season during his rookie year with the Pistons — after making a free throw late in the game.
“[Frank] knows me better than anybody else,” Drummond said with a laugh. “He knows down the stretch of games I make some of them and miss some of them. It was a great call, but we came up with the win, that’s all that matters.”
But even though Kidd was experiencing the game in a different way than he did previously as a player, he said that after being in so many gyms during his life, this was just another day at the office — just one with a different job description.
“I wasn’t nervous,” he said. “When you’re in this arena, I’ve been in a lot of them. It’s old hat, in that sense. I’m just not playing.
“I’m trying to put guys in the position to be successful. I got excited, but as a coach you have to stay even-keeled about some of the plays, and you get a little upset when something doesn’t go right. Again, this is a learning experience.
“This is summer school for me, so hopefully I’m going in the right direction.”