With Nets Eliminated, How Much Did Coaching Matter In Downward Spiral?

Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

After five consecutive seasons of playoff participation, the Nets will be sitting this one out. Though Brooklyn stunned visiting Indiana, 115-111, on Wednesday night, Atlanta’s victory over Detroit eliminated the Nets from the race for the 10^th and final Eastern Conference play-in seed.

There will be much handwringing over how this season went sideways, and you can be sure that the evaluations will lead to some roster turnover (as it always has been under General Manager Sean Marks). But the first step in stemming the plunge further into the depths of despair will be for the Nets to hire a strong Head Coach.

I’ve wondered all season how much this team’s coaching deficit contributed to its underachievement—and before the season I had set a lower bar than others. When the talking points following a string of defeats mention effort as the proximate cause, when lineups are routinely sent out that have almost no chance to succeed, and when you see a team that contains a good number of highly-regarded defensive players break down so often over the simplest things that should have been drilled into them, you have to conclude that coaching was a factor.

How much is incalculable. I’ll submit that the Nets’ coaching staff was dealt a bad hand, including a risky gamble by management on injury-prone Ben Simmons, who suited up for just 15 games. The team was otherwise short on size and shot creators. Thus, it was often left to an overburdened Mikal Bridges and a developing Cam Thomas to rescue a stagnant offense. And since the Nets’ defense bled second-chance points and points allowed in transition (they ranked last in both categories in “clutch” games, defined by NBA.com as those contests that were within a five-point margin during the final five minutes), they needed to shoot lights out to have a chance to win on most nights.   

However, that doesn’t entirely excuse the coaching missteps. From not understanding how much the offense was hamstrung from having multiple non-shooters on the floor to the suicidal switching scheme that has seen smaller guards tasked with absurd mismatches in the paint, not to mention the ease in which opponents have been able to target and abuse Thomas in isolations, the Nets weren’t always put “in the best positions to win”, which is the bare minimum standard for coaches.

Like his predecessor Jacque Vaughn, who was dismissed at the All-Star break, interim Head Coach Kevin Ollie came across well to the media and says the right things. They both wanted the Nets to play hard and together.

More often than not, they did neither under either coach. The results speak for themselves, with Vaughn (.389) and Ollie (.391) posting nearly identical winning percentages. You could even judge Ollie harsher because the Nets have blown five games to lottery-bound opponents over his 23 games whereas Vaughn had six such losses on his record during his 54-game tenure this season. My wildest guess is that if the Nets had a more competent HC, it could have translated into maybe 6-to-10 more wins, which is still play-in material.

My underlying issue with Vaughn and Ollie—and you can go back to prior Marks hires Kenny Atkinson and Steve Nash too—is that none of them had a record of success as an NBA Head Coach, with Nash having zero experience as a coach of any kind at any level. The question going forward then, as I’ve mentioned previously, is whether Marks will reach outside his familiar landscape to select (full-time) HC No. 4 in five seasons.

And make no mistake, despite that ugly hiring registry, it will be Marks doing the picking. For all the ire from the many fans who blame Marks for how this franchise went down the tubes so quickly after the hope from the superstar era, all signs are that he has Owner Joseph Tsai’s full confidence.  

I’ll have a better idea as to my HC preferences after the season, since the number of vacancies and the full list of those available to fill those vacancies isn’t known. For instance, besides the losers like the Nets, Hornets, and Wizards, there will inevitably be some teams who bow out of the playoffs earlier than expected and then suddenly opt to make a coaching change. Look out in particular for Cleveland, Phoenix, and, as always, the Lakers. That means a more coveted candidate like Mike Budenholzer, a Marks comrade who won a title in Milwaukee and looks better and better after both of his successors, will likely wait to look into those better jobs first.

Marks could also conceivably undergo a fruitless search of top candidates and then circle back to his personal choice—that’s how the Nets ended up with Nash instead of, say, Ty Lue. Marks might have some convincing to do to get Tsai to sign off on someone like James Borrego, he of the .447 career NBA winning percentage but is a Spurs offspring. Another name I’ll toss into the wind is current Spurs assistant Brett Brown, with whom Simmons had some decent seasons when Brown was the Philadelphia HC.

To be clear, I don’t have direct intel on anyone who is interested in the Nets’ gig or vice versa. However, any notion that they will run it back with Ollie next season should be thrown off the table.

Despite ignorant utterances from some casual followers. coaching matters a great deal in the NBA, and this next hire will tell us a lot about where the Nets stand in their rebuilding efforts.