Jason Kidd put top assistant Lawrence Frank in a long timeout.
Or he treated him like Fredo in “The Godfather.”
You could apply a hundred jokes and analogies to this – and I just might.
But let’s not kidd ourselves (sorry, couldn’t help it).
Jason Kidd is a megalomaniac, a certified nut-job and this shouldn’t surprise anyone. A man who’s been in domestic abuse situations, was in a public rivalry with Jim Jackson over Toni Braxton back in the day and just this past summer had a DUI that got him suspended for the first two games of the season might have a few emotional issues.
The fact that Lawrence Frank’s punishment is to do daily reporting for roughly $1 million per year because of some comical fallout the first week of the NBA season shouldn’t surprise anyone. Jason Kidd flew off the handle all the time as a player, why should this be any different when he’s a head coach?
Out of timeouts against the Los Angeles Lakers last week, he did what any logical basketball coach would do: begged a player to run into him to spill his drink onto the court – and then wonder aimlessly like a confused mental patient trying to pick up the ice while his assistants drew up a play.
Some people call this gamesmanship. For anyone else, that might be true. But for Jason Kidd – the man who once dyed his hair blonde in Phoenix – it’s just par for the course.
Jason Kidd doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. Not a surprise. He smooth talked his way into Mikhail Prokhorov’s deep, unassuming pockets to coach a team that on the surface was tailor-made for a new head coach: a cast of veterans like Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Deron Williams and Jason Terry.
But Jason Kidd couldn’t come up with something like Doc Rivers did in Boston, preaching unity, Ubuntu and whatever else Doc did that made Boston such a special place from 2008-2011(ish).
Jason Kidd certainly isn’t Phil Jackson, a Zen master of player management who got the most out of the biggest stars and somehow has loyalty to this day from the sport’s biggest egos.
But Kidd is not even capable of managing his own ego, let alone anyone else’s.
The Nets –a team that should most definitely be vying for a spot in the top three of the Eastern Conference – are a mess. At 5-13, the Nets are in 13th place in the East. The roster is built for now, but is playing like it’s built for 2015. This doesn’t all fall on Jason Kidd – but the mismanagement does.
Like begging for Frank to join your staff and begging the front office to make him the highest-paid assistant in the NBA, then turning on him because you disagree with his schemes? Well, J-Kidd, what are YOUR schemes? Do you have any original thoughts?
A typical dictator move, to force your assistants to do the heavy lifting and then throw them under the bus when it doesn’t go right. And throw some stank on it, please, by calling it a reassignment. And for an extra kick in the pants, let’s tell people you’re writing reports for the foreseeable future and banned from the bench.
The buzz on Kidd around the league is that once he turns on you, you’re going to get the brunt of his crazy.
Clearly, there’s plenty of that to go around.
No Kidding.
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