Second Choice Vaughn Just Might Be Nets’ Best Choice To Save This Season
When Kevin Durant was asked after his club’s wire-to-wire 112-85 shellacking of the rival Knicks on Wednesday night at Barclays Center about the difference in style between Steve Nash, who was ousted as Brooklyn’s Head Coach on November 1 after a 2-5 start, and newly-installed Jacque Vaughn, the Nets superstar forward pretty much dodged the question.
So I’ll try to provide an example: With the clock ticking under five minutes remaining in the first quarter and the Nets already ahead by double digits, Vaughn, who earlier in the day had the “acting” tag removed from his coaching title, didn’t like what he was seeing and called timeout. Nets Nation immediately raised their eyebrows and collectively said to themselves, “Hmm, that’s new.”
Going back to Kenny Atkinson and then Nash, both of whom had Vaughn on their staffs as a lead assistant on Brooklyn’s bench, the Nets’ coaches would often let opponents’ runs metastasize before they opted to stop the game to talk things over. Nash, who was a neophyte in the coaching business when he was hired prior to the 2020-21 season, was so fearful that he’d lose all his timeouts before crunch time that I joked that he could fill up his closet with the league-leading number of unused timeouts he took home with him after every game. As a Hall of Fame player, he was a proponent of “letting the boys work it out themselves on the court.” Too many times the solutions weren’t discovered before the games got out of hand.
Vaughn, though, has a much better sense of potential turning points in the action. He called another timeout just 44 seconds into the second quarter after the Knicks scored five quick points to cut Brooklyn’s lead to 38-27. The Nets regrouped and New York never got any closer for the rest of the night.
The Nets improved to 5-7 on the season with the win, including 3-2 with Vaughn in charge of the sideline. The team is clearly playing harder and more cohesively on both ends—not only is the ball popping in the halfcourt offense but the player movement is also night and day when compared to earlier in the season. The Nets, the worst defensive team in the league this season under Nash, have held their last four opponents to under 100 points.
However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Though the Nets gave a tough Dallas squad a pretty good scare during their visit on Monday, they have just one win versus a team with a winning record all season and that was in Game 2 against Toronto. Next up is a four-games-in-six-days trip out west, starting with this weekend’s back-to-back versus the L.A. clubs. We’ll have a better understanding of Vaughn’s growth as a coach from the days where he went 58-158 in two-plus seasons as the head man in Orlando by next week.
And as for the elephant in the room, Vaughn also hasn’t had to deal with the mercurial Kyrie Irving on a day-to-day basis very often. Irving, who is banned from the team for at least one more game until he meets certain conditions to remedy the harm he caused from promoting hateful and antisemitic content on his social media, wasn’t even around the Nets when Vaughn was an interim coach following Atkinson’s removal for the two games before the league’s COVID-19 shutdown and then the bubble resumption. In fact, the only game Irving played during Vaughn’s two stints as interim coach was the night Nash was let go, a 108-99 home loss to Chicago where Irving was noticeably disengaged.
Assuming Irving is allowed to return at some point, does Vaughn have the gravitas to get his buy-in? I had also heard about the reports that Irving ignored numerous play calls from Nash this season so he could freelance. It’s not shocking—let’s not forget that Irving went on a podcast before the Nash hiring to insist that he doesn’t need a coach.
Will Vaughn have the gumption to hold Irving accountable when he plays hero ball and/or falls asleep on his defensive responsibilities? One reason why some Nets fans were hoping that Marks would close the deal with Boston’s suspended coach Ime Udoka for this job was that the Celtics totally bought into Udoka’s defensive requirements and it brought them to the 2022 NBA Finals. Despite the Nets stars’ protestations, I will die on the hill that a strong coach would have been helpful from the start.
Of course, with so much off-the-court drama in Brooklyn these days, hiring a coach who is allegedly a stalker of women (not just a man who had a consensual affair with a subordinate who worked in the Celtics’ office, as Udoka’s team originally leaked to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski) was a bridge too far. Nets owner Joseph Tsai was reportedly getting heat from outside sources about disrupting Udoka’s year-long suspension, so General Manager Sean Marks had to look elsewhere.
He didn’t have to look too far. Vaughn, who has been in the organization since Marks’ first season in 2016, received a contract through the 2023-24 season. Vaughn joked in his pregame press conference that he was also his wife’s second choice and now he’s been married for 20 years.
Though I highly doubt Vaughn will reach anywhere close to that level of longevity, he may be what the Nets need this season—a calming voice with a wise man’s beard who has been learning how to manage games while working his way back up from the assistant’s chair.
I thought Vaughn did a fair job in his first go-round as an interim coach in 2020. His first move, though unpopular at the time and since but correct based on the levels of production, was to sit rising center Jarrett Allen in favor of the rapidly aging DeAndre Jordan. Maybe that motivated Allen to take the necessary steps toward stardom when the league returned in the bubble, where Vaughn got the best out of a rather ragtag bunch.
In this iteration, we’ll see how long Vaughn can, for instance, stick with Ben Simmons coming off the bench and how he allocates playing time between all his small guards (Seth Curry, who finally looked like himself following offseason ankle surgery in a 23-point outburst on Wednesday night, Patty Mills, Cam Thomas, and then Irving). Managing personalities, incorrectly presumed to be Nash’s strong suit based on the events that took place during his tenure, is still a major part of the job.
At least Vaughn understands that if something’s not working, he can call a timeout.