With training camp just days away, we’re going to ask a question per day about the upcoming Nets season.
What kind of coach will Jason Kidd be?
In a summer full of surprising moves for the Nets – including the blockbuster trade with the Celtics and the Andrei Kirilenko signing – no move was more unexpected than the decision to make Jason Kidd the team’s head coach a little more than a week after he announced his retirement.
Within the space of a few days, Kidd went from being one of the most cerebral and experienced players in the NBA to a neophyte head coach who heads into the season with less experience than any other coach in the league. That is why the Nets have gone to great lengths this offseason to assemble an able and experienced staff of assistants around Kidd in order to make his transition from playing to coaching as seamless as possible.
During his first foray into coaching live game action at the Orlando Summer League in July, Kidd told The Post  he did his best to try and emulate the formula that another all-time great player – Celtics legend Larry Bird – used when he transitioned from playing to coaching the Pacers without any prior experience.
Bird hired two top assistants – Rick Carlisle to run the offense and Dick Harter to run the defense – allowing Bird to oversee things and manage the team’s personalities, a formula that led to the Pacers reaching at least the Eastern Conference Finals in each of his three years at the helm, including an appearance in the 2000 NBA Finals.
Kidd has taken a similar path this summer, hiring his former coach with the Nets, Lawrence Frank, to man the defense, and highly respected longtime NBA assistant John Welch – who spent the past several seasons working under George Karl in Denver – to run the offense.
Under that premise, Kidd would be left to operate in the same role Bird did with the Pacers: doling out playing time, dealing with issues in the locker room and managing the tenor of the team. After forging a surefire Hall of Fame NBA career as a point guard in large part with his ability to make those around him better, one would think this will be the easiest part of his transition from playing to coaching.
The bigger question is how, exactly, the Nets will play under Kidd’s leadership. As previously addressed in this series, Kidd has spoken about the need to speed things up this season after the Nets were one of the league’s slowest teams in 2012-13 – but that was before the additions of veteran legs such as Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Jason Terry and Kirilenko. And after Welch came from working under Karl in Denver, is it possible some of the tenets of Karl’s dynamic offensive teams there could be implemented with the Nets?
It also can be expected the Nets will take a lot of the principles the Celtics have used defensively going back to current Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau’s time there as the defensive coordinator for Doc Rivers – a position Frank later took over after Thibodeau left Boston to coach the Bulls. The combination of Frank and Garnett being reunited in Brooklyn should mean the philosophies instilled there will be the backbone of how the Nets try to stop their opponents.
But because of the unknowns surrounding Kidd, given his lack of experience on the bench, how exactly the Nets attack things at both ends of the floor this season – not to mention smaller but equally important details such as end-of-game situations, setting his rotation and doling out minutes – will be scrutinized closely.