The season may not have ended the way the Nets and Jason Kidd wanted it to, but when you really think about all the extenuating circumstances surrounding the team, Brooklyn may have done as well as it possibly could do.
The Nets started the year with an abysmal 10-21 stretch, and in doing so, made it appear as if Billy King had made a grave mistake in constructing this team’s roster. A lot of people thought Brooklyn’s experiment was a major flop, and the play on the court certainly backed that hypothesis up. Frankly, the Nets looked like the old, washed-up, and injured team that some detractors predicted it to be before the season.
However, with their January 2nd win in Oklahoma City against the Thunder, Brooklyn started on a five-game winning streak and would end up winning ten of its first 11 games in 2014, a stretch that brought the Nets out from mediocrity right into the playoff race.
A main propellant for this sudden great play? The lineup adjustments that Jason Kidd made, as his “long” lineups–not like the traditional short or big ones–confused opposing teams enough to let the Nets finally find their groove.
Now, you can fault Kidd for his sometimes less-than-stellar press conference, the CupGate incident, and his questionable rotational moves at time, but in the brutal press environment of New York, he handled himself pretty darn well for a rookie coach in the biggest market in the NBA. Sure, Brooklyn whimpered out of the playoffs with a five-game, second-round exit at the hands of the Heat, but could you really expect them to dethrone the champs without Brook Lopez?
Obviously, it’s not fair to give Kidd all of the credit for the team’s resurgence when he didn’t actually play a minute of basketball this season, but you’d be remiss to mention the 2013-14 Nets and all of the good they did without bringing up Kidd’s name and how well he quickly transitioned from Hall-of-Fame player to head coach.
As we’ve seen many a time, great players don’t always translate to great coaches, but, with Kidd, it really appears as if the Nets have found a gem of a coach for, hopefully, years to come. The playoff success he and his team were hoping for didn’t necessarily come this season–even though beating the Raptors in Round 1 was great–but if the right players remain in Brooklyn and the right new ones are added, there’s no reason the Nets can’t have their own NBA title in a few seasons or so.
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