NBA

Billy King’s great experiment finally put to the test

After the Nets were beaten by an injury-riddled but mentally and physically tougher Bulls team in the first round of last year’s playoffs, general manager Billy King set out to find a coach and put together a roster that would solve both of those problems.

After hiring Jason Kidd, trading for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, assembling a team that costs more than $190 million and enduring an up-and-down season, the Nets will begin the playoffs Saturday afternoon in Toronto, and soon King will find out if all the moves he made will provide a different outcome this season.

“I’m anxious for the playoffs [to start],” King said Wednesday before the Nets ended their regular season with a loss to the Cavaliers in Cleveland. “Everybody has new records, and there’s seeding but it doesn’t matter.

“This is really what you play for, and the regular season prepares you for this. Now, it’s fun.”

It wasn’t fun for King or the Nets who were part of last season’s early exit, and the pain of that loss was a big factor in why King made one splash after another last summer to construct a team that many thought would go toe-to-toe with Miami and Indiana atop the Eastern Conference.

Things didn’t work out that way. The Nets stumbled and bumbled their way through the first two months of the season. But just when it looked as if the veteran team and the rookie coach were going to see their season go off the rails, they managed to put everything together all at once.

The catalyst was the switch to the small-ball lineup after the season-ending injury to center Brook Lopez. That is when Kidd inserted Shaun Livingston into the starting lineup and slid Joe Johnson to small forward, Pierce to power forward and Garnett to center. The move proved to be a stroke of genius, as the Nets took off, closing with a 34-17 finish to cruise into a playoff spot — something that wasn’t assured a few months earlier.

But while the lineup switch was the public vision of Kidd putting his imprint on the team to change its fortunes, King said behind the scenes, the veterans were buying in all the way.

“[Kidd] knew in his mind what he wanted to do, and it just took him time to really understand it,” King said. “Privately, and coaching the team, he was talking about what he wanted to do. He may not have been saying it publicly, and you may not have saw it, but internally he was working with guys, he was preaching move the ball.

“These are veteran guys, and they’re just playing basketball. Jason has given them a blueprint, and they’re following it. If we were a young team, it would be tougher, but I think having a starting lineup of all veterans, they can click and understand.”

Things have clicked over the last several months, making the moves King made last summer look much better — not to mention his heist of instant-offense guard Marcus Thornton from Sacramento for a pair of ancillary parts in Reggie Evans and Jason Terry, giving the Nets a big boost off the bench.

But the test of all of the things King has done over the past year wasn’t going to come until now, at the start of the playoffs. Each was made with the vision of finding a way to boost the Nets’ chances of going deep into the postseason and fulfilling the mandate of owner Mikhail Prokhorov to bring a championship to Brooklyn.

After seeing the way his team banded together after the early struggles, King is optimistic the toughness and mental fortitude he had hoped he’d brought to this team has been properly installed.

“I think as a group, the leadership and the togetherness they have with Jason and the players, they never doubted one another,” King said. “That’s a credit to them because they stuck together.

“When things were going chaotic at times, some teams would’ve splintered and our veterans didn’t let that happen.”

Now they have a chance to prove it won’t happen when it counts.