Jason Kidd's Decision to Leave Nets for Bucks Looking Better Every Game
They had no business being here, three overtimes in on the second night of a back-to-back, the veteran-laden Brooklyn Nets swinging for the knockout punch. Lottery teams don’t dare care this much. They don't dare refuse to die.
Thing is, nobody told the Milwaukee Bucks how to heed the script. And they’re making Jason Kidd’s decision to lead them look better every game because of it.
Four months removed from one of the messiest divorces in recent NBA history, Kidd returned to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center Wednesday night, guiding his troops to a 122-118 triple-overtime win. This just 24 hours after dispatching the New York Knicks in similarly nail-biting fashion back in Milwaukee.
Kidd, who spent the better part of seven seasons as the engine of the then-New Jersey Nets, might’ve expected at least a lukewarm welcome.
But these are not those Nets—not the team Kidd so awkwardly jettisoned this summer, and certainly not the one he marshaled to a pair of Finals appearances in 2002 and 2003. He is, at least for now, the franchise’s forgotten son.
Such a stinging ovation only made Kidd and his upstart kids want it more, of course. Indeed, it was a performance that encapsulated the best and worst of what these Bucks have become: plucky and precocious, oftentimes careless, but never, ever not caring.
Brooklyn had its haymakers—Brandon Knight botching a wide-open, would-be game-winning layup at the first-overtime buzzer, Giannis Antetokounmpo badly bending his ankle just minutes later.
And yet off the canvas they sprang, with Knight burying a triple to help send it to overtime No. 3 and Antetokounmpo doing what Greek Freaks do: popping up and walking it off.
"I've made a few and missed a few. My teammates still with me. They don't give up and never will I. TGBTG
— Bk (@Goodknight11) November 20, 2014"
Following an offseason rife with lottery expectations, the Bucks are now 7-5, good for fourth overall in the Eastern Conference (where “good” is admittedly relative).
They have one of the league’s most promising young trios in Knight, Antetokounmpo and rookie sensation Jabari Parker, not to mention a slew of secondary pieces including John Henson, Larry Sanders and Khris Middleton. The Bucks are young, long, hyperathletic and exciting. They are, it must be said, the anti-Philadelphia 76ers—a bad team that simply refuses to believe it, let alone live it.
At the reins of this runaway colt sits Kidd, whose journey from frying pan to fire to frigid Wisconsin has found him somehow—like some impossibly devilish drive during his Hall of Fame heyday—rose-scented on the other side.
After a tumultuous season as a rookie head coach tasked with taking the $186 million Nets to the Promised Land, Kidd attempted a full-on front-office coup (per Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski). It failed spectacularly.
Rather than fire Kidd outright, Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov instead sent the embattled coach to Milwaukee. The price: two second-round draft picks—as good as late first-rounders, should the Bucks’ basement-bound destiny be believed.
So here’s Jason Kidd, sent to sweat and toil in this basketball Siberia, and all he does is do what he did so many times on so many teams with so little top-tier talent and make something out of nothing, all the while couching it the way a true coach of the court only could: as student turned teacher.
"At the end of April, if hypothetically we can make it to the playoffs, we can exhale and say, 'Did we get better for the school year?” Kidd told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Charles F. Gradner just days before the season began. “I look at it as a school year. It's being able to say, 'We passed a couple classes. Did we have to redo a class?'"
Charming metaphors aside, there are sure to be botched tests aplenty. For all their youthful vigor, these Bucks remain very much a work in progress on offense, where they currently sit 25th in the league in overall efficiency. And no one is betting on Milwaukee maintaining its sixth-ranked defense. It's bad at shooting, bad at three-pointers and commit enough turnovers to make a college-town restaurant cringe.
Fitting, then, that the same point used to pluck these Bucks from their pedestal—It’s only 12 games—can work in the reverse. Milwaukee will meet its mean in many respects. Except, perhaps, for the metric that matters most: wins and losses.
Kidd doesn’t deserve all the credit, of course. Not when three of his players boast perennial-All-Star potential. What the Bucks give Kidd, though, is something the Nets never could: a chance to mold men, rather than simply manage them.
One need only ask Lionel Hollins about the latter. Following their fifth straight loss, the Nets now sit at a shaky 4-7 in the East.
Just as it did a year ago, Brooklyn has made chaos its early season mantra. Things have soured so quickly, in fact, that Joe Johnson has already taken to trumpeting concerns over his team's ball movement in no uncertain terms.
And so it is that what mere months ago seemed like the simplest of morality plays—Shakespearean-level treachery squashed in its steps—has suddenly flipped entirely.
Indeed, shaky and shady as Kidd's Brooklyn tenure was, who can blame Milwaukee for betting the house? Especially when no one's really sure where that house might stand. For all his flaws—and there are more than a few—it's in Kidd's ability to connect with with these kids, flawed though they are, that Bucks fans should find their most soothing solace.
And why not? It is, after all, the kind of clout that comes from a near-20-year career spent seeing things 10 moves before they happen. Of finding the perfect path no one else knows is there.
All statistics cited in this piece are accurate as of the end of play on Nov. 19.
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