The first reaction is probably this: Why?
Why would the Nets entrust what they believe to be a contending core to a pair of hands and a set of eyes that have never coached a minute of basketball at any level before? Why would they be so reckless, so feckless? Jason Kidd was certainly a great player. It would seem he would be a terrific coach, but who knows? You want to take a flier on a maybe?
But the more you think about it, this is more and more the more appropriate question: Why not?
If you believe Kidd is coaching material, what is the point of ensuring he follows the how-to handbook? If you think he’ll have the goods in a year or two, why wouldn’t you think he already has the goods? And if you’re the Nets, and Phil Jackson doesn’t want the job, and Jeff Van Gundy seems lukewarm about the job, and you clearly haven’t identified your ideal candidate because if you had you would’ve hired him already …
Well, why not?
Why not take a flier on a maybe? Especially this maybe?
“If you showed me 1,000 players who tell me they want to coach in the NBA,” a basketball executive said yesterday, “I’d tell you 995 of them should probably look for another line of work. And of the five that are left, four of them are gonna have to put in all the grunt work that every other coach has to put in: spend some time as a scout, as an assistant, interview for jobs you have no shot at, wait for your big break …
“And this is the one out of a thousand I’d say, ‘This might just work.’ ”
Part of the reason it sounds so off the wall and outside the envelope is because of the times in which we live. But for years, basketball had no qualms about employing player-coaches. Dave DeBusschere did it in the NBA before he was a Knick. Dave Cowens did it for a time, and Lenny Wilkens’ first 179 of the 1,332 career victories came in a dual role. Bill Russell won a couple of championships doing it, though he was helped by having Bill Russell playing center for him.
So it hasn’t always been gospel that you have to serve an apprenticeship before someone hands you the reins. It’s also no guarantee that just because you’re identified as a can’t-miss coach you won’t miss when you trade in your tank top for a business suit. It seemed there was no way Willis Reed could miss as a coach, and within three years of being one of the greatest on-court leaders in basketball history, he was given Red Holzman’s old job.
He lasted one year and 14 games.
But in a lot of ways, Kidd makes even more sense than The Cap’n did back in the day. Reed inherited a team in steep decline; Kidd would take over a team that won 49 games with a solid nucleus whose best player, Deron Williams, happens to play the same position Kidd played at a Hall of Fame level for 19 years. Reed had spent those three years outside the game, and those can feel like dog years; Kidd would walk into the first Nets team meeting and bring instant — and absolute — credibility.
And if you’ve ever had the pleasure of talking the game with Kidd, you know his basketball IQ hovers around genius level. He has the chops and he has the cred. And he’s smart enough that he would surely surround himself with a brain trust of experienced assistants.
Yes, he brings baggage, more than an average candidate would bring, enough that the average candidate might not even get an interview: past charges of domestic violence, last summer’s DWI charge in the Hamptons. But in an odd way, that almost might help him in this job. He has been proven to be human time and again, and there is no NBA team that survives a year without dealing with some kind of off-court turmoil.
And in a curious twist, he once was involved in a coaching mutiny, when he helped nudge Byron Scott to the gangplank in Jersey almost a decade ago. The SEC smartly hired Joe Kennedy once, figuring who’s a better guard for the henhouse than the wolf himself? Kidd may never win a title. Time will tell that. But he will never be sabotaged by his own players. Guaranteed.
The Nets can be very safe here, can throw a bucket of money at Pacers assistant Brian Shaw, the consensus Next Big Thing. They can keep pestering Van Gundy. They can have an organizational change of heart on George Karl, for all the faults he would bring to the job. Safe, safer, safest. No one could kill the Nets for any of those picks.
Or they can take a chance. They can try to draw the inside straight. Once upon a time, the Nets were wandering in the wilderness when a very smart man named Rod Thorn saw a player named Kidd was available, gathered his chips and figured, as he’s said a thousand times since, “Well, why the hell not?”
Why not, indeed.