It wasn’t long ago the Nets were sitting atop the NBA’s Atlantic Division with an 11-4 record, and Avery Johnson was being named the league’s coach of the month for November.
Three weeks later, the Nets have lost eight of their last 10 games, their star point guard, Deron Williams, has questioned the team’s offensive system and some have wondered whether Johnson’s job is in jeopardy.
Given the team’s recent struggles, Johnson said he doesn’t have an issue with any of it.
“That’s the way it goes,” Johnson said after Friday’s practice. “You really can’t get too high or too low. … We had a pretty good November, and I was coach of the month. Then we lose a game, and I’m a terrible coach, the players are bad and we’ve got bad chemistry.
“People always talk about what’s fair and unfair. I think it’s all fair. Whatever it is — good, bad or indifferent. I think we’ve just got to stay encouraged. We have good pieces, and we’re capable of playing good basketball.”
Johnson, who was fired as head coach of the Mavericks in 2008 after a very successful run, said he was comfortable with the position in which he finds himself now, and he knew when he took the job how it would end.
“At some point after I signed on as a coach, when I signed on the dotted line, a couple of things are going to happen at one point,” Johnson said with a smile. “One, I’m going to get fired. Two, I’m going to resign. Three, I’m going to get reassigned. One of those three things happens to every head coach in this league as soon as you sign your name on that dotted line.
“At the end of the day, for every coach, one of those three things are going to happen. So right now, what I’m really, really concerned about is us playing really, really good basketball. Until ownership tells me something otherwise, I’m going to continue to do my job.”
With the Nets in the middle of a three-day break between games, that job consists of trying to find a way to get a group that not too long ago was playing as well as anyone in the Eastern Conference back on track. One area Johnson identified for improvement was to try and rebuild the trust between his players, something he thinks has been lacking during the team’s recent struggles.
Trust was something guard Joe Johnson also made a point of referring to after Wednesday’s 100-86 loss to the Knicks at the Garden, saying part of the offensive issues is the Nets aren’t fully running through their sets, instead opting to break them off and try to make things happen individually.
“I think we’ve just got to get back to playing freely and having fun,” Joe Johnson said. “It just seems like guys aren’t having fun. That’s the main thing. We shouldn’t look at this as a job. We should look at this as going out and having a great time. We’ve got the best jobs in America, and there’s no way we should not have fun.“Going back to training camp and the first 15 or 16 games of the season, we were having fun. It was fun. It seems like guys aren’t really having that much fun, for whatever reason. … We’re in a pretty good funk right now, and we’ve got to try to fight out of it.”
Part of the issues recently have centered around the critique of Avery Johnson’s offense that Williams delivered following Monday’s practice. Whether it was related to that or not, the coach said he spent all of yesterday’s practice focused on the offensive system, and installing some new plays ahead of the Nets’ next game tomorrow in Brooklyn against the Sixers.
But even now, the confidence Joe Johnson had entering the season, when he declared the Nets would be better than the Knicks, and the team had a chance to do something special this season, hasn’t wavered.
“No, not at all, because I know what we’re capable of,” he said. “I know what I’ve seen us do, and if we stick together, we can do something real special.”