NEW YORK — Just when you thought you’ve seen it all, here are the Brooklyn Nets hiring a head coach without trying to make a splash or win the press conference over their mighty neighbors from across the East River in Manhattan.
Rookie general manager Sean Marks went all Spurs on us, secretly interviewing and hiring the highly respected lead assistant coach of the Hawks, Kenny Atkinson, without letting anyone in on his first major move.
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Sure looks like the culture in Brooklyn has started to change, for the better. This is the same franchise that once lived to tweak its big brother. The Nets put up a billboard directly across from Madison Square Garden when Mikhail Prokhorov took over with Jay Z as his wingman. They brought back franchise legend Jason Kidd to coach when he had just retired as a Knick a month earlier. They even unwittingly broke the bank to import Celtics legends Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett long after they were in their Knicks-crushing primes.
Somebody wised up over at the Barclays Center because the Nets are now going about their business as they should have first done when they came from Newark, even if they wanted to fit in with Brooklyn’s hipsters. As one Eastern Conference executive confessed of the Atkinson hire, “I heard that Kenny was going to get a job and be the first assistant coach hired, but I hadn’t heard Brooklyn, specifically.”
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Even if Marks had gone to the grid-locked corner of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues and announced he was bringing in Atkinson, who has been praised across the league for his development of Jeremy Lin, Kent Bazemore and other players as well as his grasp of X’s and O’s, there’s a good chance no one would have noticed.
That’s because Phil Jackson has been making a spectacle of himself in recent days. After a 50-loss season that produced only a glimmer of hope in Kristaps Porzingis, the Knicks president chastised the media for making it harder to attract free-agent recruits and scolded those who forgot that he had won 11 championships, although he seems to be the last one to know that his jewelry has little to do with building a contender.
“There are critics?” Jackson said. “Who are these people? Why would people even say that? Do they have 11 championships to show you when they talk about that? They got a lot of excuses. That’s the way it is. That discussion doesn’t have to go on.”
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Unlike Marks, the “Zen Master” took to his bully pulpit to tell the world that his next coach will share similar views and, most importantly, play the only basketball system Jackson knows to exist. It’s the Triangle or … nothing. That’s why it made sense for Jackson to reach out to one of his former players, Luke Walton, the Warriors’ lead assistant who went 39-4 in Steve Kerr’s absence. Nobody reported that Walton had been offered the job. Sources say that Jackson did talk to him about the position, but that Walton doesn’t want the gig. As of now. He might talk to Jackson down the line, but it doesn’t seem like he’ll wind up in New York.
Yet, Jackson misread the media reports. Or, more likely, he simply misconstrued what he was told that had been reported.
Press accounts of coaching actions are untrue. Nobody has been asked nobody said no.
— Phil Jackson (@PhilJackson11) April 18, 2016
As opposed to Marks’ secret play for Atkinson, all of New York knows that Jackson’s top choice is his trusted lieutenant Kurt Rambis, who took over for Fisher for the final 28 games of the season and lost 19 times. That dropped his all-time coaching record to 99 games below .500, something that Jackson won’t be able to sell to Carmelo Anthony, or scores of Knicks fans who are clamoring for the former Knicks assistant, Tom Thibodeau.
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By contrast, Marks has a much-easier sales job with another former Knicks assistant, Atkinson, a Long Island product who knows the value of hard work. He came out of Richmond 25 years ago and tried out for Pat Riley’s Knicks summer league team. He didn’t make it, so he went overseas for the majority of his 14-year pro career. An assistant with Mike D’Antoni and Budenholzer, he’s now working 35 miles from his hometown.
Without control of their own No. 1 pick until 2019, it’s time to roll up their sleeves in Brooklyn and who better than a guy who won’t be fazed by what the Knicks are doing, but will be consumed with helping his own players get better.
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“The Nets need the kind of energy and passion that Kenny brings to create a new culture,” the executive said. “They’ve hired a guy whose greatest strength is player development. It’s also a great hire from the standpoint that people from outside New York don’t get how important it is that someone shares the sensibilities of the fan base, the media and culture of the city.”
We don’t know if Jackson will ever figure that out. But there is hope for New York basketball once you consider that Sean Marks, out of Auckland, New Zealand, has been in town for only the last 60 days.
