ESPNBoston.com reported Thursday night the Nets reached out to Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge about potentially sitting down with Rivers to discuss the team’s head-coaching opening, but that Ainge refused to grant them permission.
That Ainge would deny the Nets a chance to sit down with Rivers isn’t at all surprising, given he still has three years and over $20 million remaining on the extension he signed with Boston back in 2011 — one that made him one of the game’s highest-paid coaches.
Like Phil Jackson, whom the Nets reached out to previously for the position that opened up when interim coach P.J. Carlesimo was not retained after the team’s first-round loss to the Bulls, landing Rivers would have been a home-run hire. The Nets are hoping to build on their success in the team’s first season in Brooklyn, one that saw them finish with a 49-33 record and the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference.
Ainge recently had said Rivers, whose job status had been up in the air since he said he would “take a step back and catch his breath” after the Celtics were ousted in six games to the Knicks in the first round of the playoffs, would be returning to the Celtics for his 10th season.
Carlesimo, meanwhile, has since moved on from the Nets, and recently agreed to sign on with ESPN for the remainder of the playoffs as an analyst. In a conference call with reporters yesterday, he admitted that owner Mikhail Prokhorov’s stated goal of winning a championship by 2015 — two seasons from now — could be an unrealistic burden for whomever his replacement to bear.
“I don’t know if that’s realistic the way the roster is right now,” said Carlesimo, who went 35-19 after taking over for Avery Johnson. “I would not say that team could not win a championship. We thought we could this year if things broke a little better for us.
“But if you have that on your plate, that you need to win a championship in two years, I think it makes it a little challenging. But, again, everybody starts the year saying we want to win a championship. Brooklyn has more reason to say that than a lot of the other teams in the league.”
After spending the first two years under Prokhorov’s ownership stuck at the bottom of the NBA standings while finishing up their time in New Jersey, the Nets underwent a massive roster overhaul — including committing over $330 million of Prokhorov’s fortune in present and future contracts — to bring what was expected to be a winning team to Brooklyn in the team’s inaugural season inside Barclays Center.
But with increased talent level also came increased expectations, which eventually played a role in Johnson’s dismissal after a 14-14 start.
“Well, I think it made it difficult to keep the job more so for Avery, because Avery was brought in, and he did the dirty work,” Carlesimo said. “You got the two years of getting your head knocked off while they were getting the roster together and getting the salary cap right and all that.
“Then when the team had a very representative team to put out there and you had all the great things that we all enjoyed this year in Brooklyn, he didn’t get a chance to reap the benefits of those two years, which was unfortunate.”
As for Carlesimo’s eventual replacement, he dismissed the idea the team needs a veteran coach to succeed.
“I don’t think there is a magic person in terms of a profile,” he said. “I don’t think it’s got to be somebody that’s coached in the league for 10 years.
I don’t think it’s somebody that has to have been a head coach. There are too many examples of guys with no coaching experience thriving right off the bat … in general, I think it’s a good group, and whoever is lucky enough to get the job will like working with that group.”