Avery Johnson said he never saw his firing coming.
“You don’t think as a .500 team that something like this would happen,” Johnson said yesterday in a press conference at the team’s practice facility after he was relieved of his duties as the Nets head coach. “But this is ownership’s decision. This is what we signed up for.”
When Johnson was hired back in June of 2010, what he knew he signed up for was a two-year wait in purgatory — otherwise known as Newark — while the construction of Barclays Center, the team’s palatial new home in Brooklyn, was completed.
But after enduring those two seasons in Newark, when he was handed rosters short on talent and long on injuries, the Nets improved their talent this summer, thanks to billionaire owner Mikhail Prokhorov committing more than $330 million in current and future salaries to re-sign star point guard Deron Williams and surround him with enough talent to compete.
But after going 3-10 in December, including Wednesday’s 108-93 loss in Milwaukee, the Nets gave Johnson his walking papers less than a month after Johnson earned Eastern Conference Coach of the Month honors.
“I think a lot of times being a coach is not always fair,” Johnson said. “You’re not always going to get a fair shake, because we don’t own the teams. We coach.”
The coach, who went 60-116 in his two-plus seasons with the Nets, was coaching this season on the final year of his initial three-year contract, and had pushed for an extension to no avail, something Johnson said may have hurt him in his ability to get through to this year’s team.
“You got to have in this business the power in terms of the ability to coach,” Johnson said. “It would help if you had a contract the players respect. That’s the nature of our business.
“When you don’t have that, sometimes when things tend to go sideways you just don’t have the full support and if you don’t have the full support of ownership in a lot of different areas, it’s just not going to work.”
Johnson also seemed to think that there may have been some disharmony in the locker room, as well.
“Seasons have a way of changing, and this was a bad patch, a bad spot in the season, and basically ownership and management said that. So, if that was the case, then I thought maybe we should just ride it out.
“But, obviously, something changed, and ownership got a lot of feedback from players. Maybe players weren’t happy with the direction of where we were going, and decided that, collectively, they probably all decided that there needed to be a change. And that’s a part of where we are.”
No longer having to worry about tonight’s game in Brooklyn against the Bobcats, Johnson admitted he hadn’t given much thought to the future.
“For me, I don’t have a lot of different options, but this has happened pretty fast,” Johnson said. “It’s my wife’s birthday today … we had a dinner planned. So I have to figure out what’s going to happen with her when we get home. It’s not a great birthday gift.”