He was wrong, of course. It was a nice enough gesture for Jason Kidd to try, in his eighth game as a basketball coach, after watching his team trade in its first-half sprinter’s spikes for second-half clown shoes, after watching some of his players calcify down the stretch, watching others simply vanish.
You want to rip someone?
Rip me, Kidd said.
“Just bad coaching,” Kidd said of the 108-98 beating the Portland Trail Blazers had just laid upon his team, the latest humbling of a start that now sits at 3-7. “I take the blame for this. This falls on my shoulders.”
Maybe that’s what’s written on Page 37 of the “Coaching for Beginners” pamphlet, or maybe that’s simply Kidd — who was suspended for the first two games of the season because of his drunk-driving result — falling back on his favorite stand-by from when he was a player:
When in doubt, always blame the coach.
Either way it was wrong, and it was misguided, and it misses the point of what has become a hilarious nightly high-stakes poker game between the two city basketball teams playing (allegedly) The City Game:
Knicks: I’ll see your listlessness and raise you a lethargic!
Nets: I’ll see your lethargic and raise you a sluggish!
Knicks: I’ll re-raise you with lackluster!
Nets: I’m all in with lifeless!
This was the Nets’ turn to take another weary whack at putting on its feet what was supposed to be a New York basketball season for the ages (and not the aged), an opportunity to hammer a Portland team coming off an overtime game in another country just the day before. And for a quarter, they damn near tried.
For a quarter, they were on pace for 160 points.
Soon enough, they were due for a pacemaker. And so it goes. Tuesday night, in Detroit, the Knicks will take on another team coming back from a traveling smackdown, the Pistons dropping three out of four out west, and if history tells us the most vulnerable of all teams is the one returning home from toiling in the Pacific time zone … well, history hasn’t yet seen teams with the largesse of New York’s generous basketball players.
The Knicks, to date, are simply bad, though.
The Nets are another story. They aren’t just bad at this point, they are also insolent. They have a lot of players who made an awful lot of noise this summer about harboring the secrets of championship formulas. That sounded nice. What would have been better is if they would have brought those clandestine weapons to Brooklyn with them.
Instead, the highest-profile among them — Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett — ran and hid after this most hideous performance of the season. Joe Johnson would have, too, had he not been tracked by the Post’s Tim Bontemps. Johnson confided the team held a meeting afterward about “what we have to figure out.”
What would behoove Johnson — and the Nets — to figure out are the nights — such as this one — when it is a requirement he be the equal to his $21.5 million contract and try to pick up the slack for missing teammates (in this case Deron Williams and Brook Lopez) and not sleepwalk through 38 minutes and 12 lousy shot attempts.
What would behoove the Nets is to show they have changed the way they do business from when they were in New Jersey, when nobody cared about their basketball games and fewer wanted to hear about them when the games were over. That was supposed to be different now. Mikhail Prokhorov speaks of a franchise worthy of calling New York home.
Laughable. The Nets still allow the same players-rule culture to exist that helped crush the last spasm of prosperity a decade ago. Then, it was Kidd who was allowed to run amok, to serve at his own discretion.
Now it’s Garnett and Pierce and Johnson, acting like no-account losers three weeks into the season, allowing Mason Plumlee (offering insights on his long and storied 10-game career in the league) and Shaun Livingston (one of the game’s all-time stand-up guys) and Jason Terry (the one Net with championship pedigree who feels compelled to act the part and not just skate on fawning, faded headlines) to be team spokesmen after a wretched performance like this one.
And maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. It was Kidd, after all, who bulldozed every executive, flack and coach who disagreed with him the first time around; why would anything be any different on his watch? Which means, maybe he’s right.
Maybe this muck pile really is his fault after all.