Son of a gun. They really did it.
The Nets are really going to introduce Jason Kidd this afternoon at 2 p.m. at Barclays Center. They really are going to reach back to the most glorious moments of their NBA history, to the greatest Net who ever dribbled a brown NBA ball in their uniform, and they are going to entrust him with their future.
They really are.
It is a bold move, a brave move, a brassy move. Time will tell us if it was a brilliant move, and so will the bottom line. Kidd does not inherit a team on the make — they already have smashed through the glass ceiling of their recent past, they are a talented team with a solid core, owned by a man with big ambition and even bigger … well, fortitude.
“It’s a role I’ve been studying for over the course of my playing days,” said Kidd, and anyone who ever has watched him play knows that is exactly right, knows he has forever been a coach on the court, the smartest player in every arena he ever has walked in. If anyone can make this transition, he’s the one to do it.
Can he do it?
That answer will be easier to determine than you think, because so much of Kidd’s success, immediate and long-term, will revolve around one thing: the relationship with Deron Williams that officially, today, takes a turn for the serious, a turn for the somewhat surreal, and a turn, one way or another, for both men’s legacies.
This was Williams’ reaction on Twitter when the news became official: “Excited to get to work under our new head coach. [Jason Kidd is a] great leader and great basketball mind will be a great head coach. #BROOKLYN”
That’s a good start: Kidd and Williams have been friends for a while, and it was almost exactly a year ago when Williams snapped a selfie picture of him and Kidd at a golf outing together, at a time when they were pondering teaming up in Brooklyn or Dallas, before Williams decided to sign his name to a max-out deal with the Nets and Kidd chose to settle across the river with the Knicks.
They will not be friends now, an important detail that actually may have started to work itself out in December, after Williams criticized soon-to-be-former coach Avery Williams’ offense. Now, Kidd never has been shy about quarreling with his own coaches — Byron Scott still has tire-tread marks on his back, and Kidd wasn’t the biggest Avery fan during their own working relationship with the Mavericks.
Still, Kidd was fairly pointed when asked about Williams’ dissatisfaction: “I don’t think it has anything to do with the coach. I think it’s just a matter of getting comfortable making shots. Also, he has new teammates. He’s got to get used to a new crew. It’s always a growing period. He’s a grownup. He’ll figure it out. All things don’t go well right away sometimes. He’s just going through a struggle shooting the ball, but he’s one of the best at what he does, so he’ll work through it.”
So Kidd knows what he’s getting here, and what he’s getting in to. He is fully aware of the brilliance Williams can bring to the position, that on his very best nights he channels the very best of Kidd in his prime with the added aspect of a splendid jump shot out to 25 feet.
But Kidd was Kidd almost every night in those sublime years, bringing a level of consistent excellence that Williams hasn’t yet displayed with the Nets.
Kidd has to bring that out of him.
Has to summon Williams’ Inner Kidd.
If he can, there’s no telling how intriguing this partnership can become, and how successful it can be. Put it this way: The team Kidd greeted as a point guard in 2001 wasn’t anywhere close to as talented as the one he meets as a coach, and all that team did was win back-to-back conference titles.
The Jersey Nets never had anything like LeBron’s Heat — or Roy’s Pacers, or Derrick’s Bulls — to contend with, the way the Brooklyn Nets will. But that’s another conversation. The Nets didn’t dismiss two coaches in the past 5 1/2 months and bypass Brian Shaw’s rich coaching pedigree simply to build an internship program. They expect to win big, and immediately. They expect Kidd to engineer that, to ignite it, to inspire it.
It starts with the old point guard building something real, something permanent, with the young one. That’s where it starts. And that’s where it will end. One way or another.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com