WASHINGTON — The beauty of Jason Kidd, in part, was even in the January of his career, even at the start, he understood the game well enough that he never let things bother him that would send other players into month-long funks. Points? Shooting percentage? Vertical leap?
Even then he was wise enough to know what really matters.
Which means that now, in the December of that brilliant career, he cares about those things even less.
“I didn’t come into this league as a scorer,” he said with that wry grin last night, maybe half an hour after helping the Knicks to their third straight victory, a 96-88 grind against the Wizards. “And it doesn’t look like I’m going out that way, either.”
It’s good to be the king, and it’s better to be the accomplished elder statesman sometimes, too. Mike Woodson finally did what he had threatened to do for weeks, shaking up his starting lineup, moving Kidd to the bench, asking him to concentrate on being more of a point guard, more of a set-up man, more of a distributor.
“All I wanted,” Woodson said, “is for him to be the player he’s been, do the things he’s done his whole career.”
Kidd’s career has never been completely defined by the box score, despite his 107 career triple-doubles, and his game has always been one best appreciated through the eyes rather than the prism of a calculator. At the end of Kidd’s greatest games, even in his prime, it wasn’t unusual to look at a score sheet and wonder if you’d actually seen the same game as the statisticians.
“He plays basketball like jazz,” his old coach, Byron Scott, once said, and if Kidd doesn’t always hit all the high notes any more now that he’s 21 days shy of his 40th birthday, there are nights he can still offer a riff or two that conjures a memory or three.
So last night he turned in 28 minutes and he got his uniform dirty on defense, he had five assists and a steal, and if the Wizards’ kid guards, Bradley Beal and John Wall, sometimes looked as if they could break and sprain both of his ankles whenever they pleased, he made life as difficult as possible for them.
“The old guy still has a trick or two up his sleeve,” Knicks forward Kurt Thomas said with a grin last night.
Of course, it wasn’t all rose petals and champagne for Kidd. He missed four more 3-pointers last night and none of them were especially close, which makes him seven for his last 49 from behind the arc, and for someone whose 1,955 career 3s ranks him third on the all-time list (despite his rep for never having much of a J) — and someone who hit over 50 percent for most of the season’s first two months — that’s a bothersome problem.
Though not a burdensome one.
“They all felt good tonight,” Kidd said. “It’s like a pitcher or a golfer. In warm-ups you feel like you’re going to make everything, but then you give up 10 runs or you can’t make a par. Same thing with me. In practice, everything’s been going in. I just have to have a talk with the 3-point gods.”
Said Woodson: “Someday soon he’s going to make one, a big one, and we’re all going to forget about the problems he’s been having.”
That’s certainly the way the Knicks are rooting, of course, but in truth Woodson’s lineup shift might be precisely the kind of recalibration that Kidd — and, by association, his team — needs. After all, Kidd was signed to be a back-up, more contributor than catalyst. Circumstance — and his own brilliant early season — altered that, and the effects have shown.
Asking Kidd to be a role player isn’t an insult; it’s living up to the terms of the deal team and player made with each other in the first place. And without him, they never beat the Wizards last night.
“He’s a great example of a professional,” Raymond Felton said. “For him to just take the role of saying, ‘I’ll come off the bench, play backup point guard,’ what else can you say about him? He’s a great teammate and a great mentor to me.”
Consider that a role fulfilled.