The Lovable Battler Brooklyn Nets Are No More After Kenny Atkinson’s Firing
The Brooklyn Nets began this strange old season in a strange new transition, caught between the positive battler team-culture vibes of their recent past and the all-in superstar vibes of their future. It was an inevitable transition if they ever wanted to compete for championship in this Sean Marks Era, you simply don’t win NBA rings without at least one if not three elite players on your roster, but that didn’t mean it was ever going to be an easy transition... or one without a few victims along the way.
That transition is over now. Kenny Atkinson, the head coach that Sean Marks and the Nets hired just two months after Marks himself was enticed over from the San Antonio Spurs and who has been the tweedle-dum to Marksy’s tweedle-dee ever since, was fired over the weekend in a rather stunning development. Well, stunning in that it actually happened. It was apparently a badly kept secret that there were tensions at that club but with Atkinson having been such a big part not only of the Nets’ revival but also the career developments of a number of their best players it was a leap of faithlessness to think he might truly get the flick like this. Right up until it happened.
First thing’s first, before getting into why this is probably the best thing for all parties involved (including Kenny Atkinson)... why? Why did this happen? Who is to blame? When do we start burning our Kyrie Irving effigies?
Yeah hold up there half a second, chief. No need to be thinking about blame. This is the NBA and everybody involved are of the adult variety of human being which means that cheap and emotional conclusions are silly. This, like most things, will have been a complicated situation with many contrasting factors and plenty of grey area. It’s also tricky to determine what reports and rumours are based in fact and which are maybe biased towards certain perspectives. So let’s pump the brakes on the easy narratives.
What we definitely know is that this wasn’t about this season. This season was a freebie as Kevin Durant recovers from injury, especially with Kyrie Irving now out for the rest of it too having only played 20 games. Caris LeVert has been injured too. In fact Atkinson’s gotten a lot of credit for keeping this team afloat despite those injuries but even as they sit seventh in the Eastern Conference standings as the league goes into a COVID-19 based hiatus and in line for another playoff appearance when it all eventually resumes (even with a losing 30-34 record)... none of that really matters compared to the prospect of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving returning at full capacity next time. Keep that in mind because Atkinson literally never got to coach Kevin Durant on the court. He never had his top starting five this term.
Which means this decision had to have been made based on Atkinson’s viability of taking this team on a deep playoff run. Well, he’s won one playoff game in his career as a head coach so there are question marks there about the Xs and Os side of things. Admittedly that was with a much weaker team but you get the idea. He’s proven as a brilliant player development coach... he’s unproven with a team that has genuine expectations.
Because, like, it’s one thing to be the lovable battlers who punch above their weight. Nobody cares if they get dropped 4-1 in the first round of the playoffs, everyone’s just happy they’re there. But once you bring in expectations of challenging for championships then suddenly there are no days off. No excuses. No oh-well-at-least-we-gave-it-our-best-shots. That can be a shock to the system for some players who simply aren’t used to the scrutiny and accountability that it brings, especially when the change came so suddenly (even Sean Marks didn’t know KD was signing until the dude’s instagram reveal), and amongst the whispers emerging from this are those that Kevin Durant perhaps didn’t think that the Nets had the necessary habits to be challenging at the top of the NBA. Some people have framed that as a star player launching a mutiny. But strip all that back and it’s pretty easy to envision how that might be the case.
Kevin Durant spoke pretty glowing about Kenny Atkinson and his team culture when he signed with the team. Kyrie Irving was a bit more interested, I suspect, in playing in his hometown and alongside KD (and DeAndre Jordan who they brought along for the ride). Neither of them actively tried to force Kenny Atkinson out but it’s pretty obvious that if they wanted him to stay then he’d still be there. The actual decision was made after a team meeting between Atkinson and the players, looking to clear the air about whatever staleness had been settling into the unit. It sounds like a pretty heated affair and within days Sean Marks and Kenny Atkinson, as well as new owner Joey Tsai, were having their own discussions at a board level. Next thing you know... bang.
Sean Marks: “I would have loved Kenny to be here long term. I think we all have ideas that this is going to last forever, and we'll keep building this together. We had a great run for four years. We enjoyed each other, I think we grew immensely. He grew as a coach, hopefully I've grown as a GM and so forth. We made plenty of mistakes, and we had fun along the way. These are the circumstances. The position we find ourselves in now is, 'What helps us get it to the next level?' And I think what we debated and what we deliberated on was this was a time where the team needs another voice, and that's where we are at.”
We’re never gonna know the exact reasonings but it’s not outlandish to imagine Kenny Atkinson having as much of a say in this as anyone else. He didn’t resign, he was fired by ‘mutual agreement’... but just as KD and Kyrie didn’t fight to save him he doesn’t seem to have put up much of a scrap himself. He saw the direction the team was heading in and figured he would be more comfortable elsewhere. This is a guy who will have no trouble finding a new job. He’s done wonders with the Nets and any rebuilding team in their right mind should be looking at him... especially the one across town. Kenny’s all good. In fact he might even be in a better place now, not having to deal with any damage to his reputation that continued tension into next season might have caused.
This isn’t only about KD and Kyrie either. DeAndre Jordan came along with them and has been playing off the bench behind 21 year old Jarrett Allen all season. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to think that was a bone to pick... especially not when caretaker coach Jacque Vaughn immediately moved DJ into the starting centre role in his first game in charge. Hint hint. But they’re not the only ones. Spencer Dinwiddie hasn’t been playing as well this season. Others are confused about their jobs on the court and Atkinson’s communication levels have been criticised, at least according to reports. Then there’s the style of basketball they’re playing which Kyrie Irving has struggled with when he’s been available and which perhaps doesn’t quite suit a team that’ll have one of the great mid-range shooters of all-time in Durant as well as it could.
So we add all that up and come back to Marks’ point about a new voice. Sometimes that’s the way it is. Mark Jackson did very good things with the Golden State Warriors back in the day but they needed Steve Kerr to take them to the next level. The Nets are looking for their Steve Kerr now. And they’ll be doing so without that psychic conflict of the past versus the future any longer. Kenny Atkinson’s firing has made it very clear that the future has won out, the past was nice but this ship has shifted course now.
Which puts Sean Marks in a very enticing place. Now, heaps depends on getting the right coach involved but as a general manager, think of what he had to work with when he first took the job. Now think of what he’s got to work with now. Having once scrambled to turn cents into dollars he’s now got a roster full of players whose trade value has skyrocketed thanks to the tutelage of Atkinson. Absolutely no way should they move Caris LeVert or Jarrett Allen... but if they did want to they’d get plenty back in return. The Nets need one or two more reliable veteran guys to hold it down. Perhaps a third option if they don’t agree with me that LeVert can be that guy next to Durant and Irving. And Sean Marks has the resource to go out and get them now.
This is his reward for the last four years of battles. He gets to be a win-now general manager, making win-now trades and decisions. We’re talking video game moves here. Our guy could go out and trade for Steven Adams if he wanted (curious hypothetical given KD’s presence here). He gets to be an active guy on trade deadline again only on the other side of discussions. He can partake in the buyout bargain bin. All the fun stuff. Yeah, to be fair that comes with much tougher margins of scrutiny but then who said only the players were entering this new phase of Brooklyn Nets basketball?
That scrutiny will be pretty fascinating though. Up until this point Kenny Atkinson has been a recognised hero within the basketball fraternity after what he’s achieved in turning this team around and he’s gotten off the bus before it starts traversing those tricky winding mountainside roads. Sean Marks’ role in all this goes to show the hierarchy involved here as the general manager gets to tell the coach to bugger off if he wants and Marksy therefore gets to keep his seat at the front of the bus. But he’s not driving, he’s just the guy with the map calling out directions. The driver comes even higher up the chain of command and it’d be naive not to think that owner Joe Tsai had a lot to do with this call to let Atkinson off the vehicle. His name isn’t one that’s been mentioned very often but this decision can’t go ahead without the owner ratifying it.
Tsai is proving himself to be a hands-on type of owner. He has more of a relationship with players than Mikhail Prokhorov did and a much bigger media presence too (including that time he put out a long open letter about defending Chinese sovereignty after the Daryl Morey stuff preseason (which feels about a thousand years ago at this point)... which is something to keep in mind when I say that my ideal candidate for this gig next season would be the Houston Rockets’ Mike D’Antoni). Tsai had already had a CEO resign just two months after he bought the full ownership of the franchise back in August 2019 (that resignation coming in the weeks after the NBA x China situation – Joe Tsai is Chinese-American and the co-founder of Chinese online retail group Alibaba). This is also a franchise that hasn’t quite hit the heights, understandably given the injuries, that they hoped to in terms of crowd numbers this season and a franchise that has chipped up plenty of cash for what’s now considered one of the very best training facilities in the NBA. Tsai’s purchase of the Nets was the biggest team sale in NBA history.
In other words, if you thought this was only about Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving getting another ring then you’re dead wrong. There are huge expectations here from the very top of the tree on downwards and while Kenny Atkinson has been made the scapegoat this time, Sean Marks will be under even more pressure to deliver from here on out. The kind of pressure that he should be welcoming by the way as it means he’s in the top echelon of his profession... but these Brooklyn Nets are not the lovable battlers any more. After the events of the last week nobody can be under any illusions otherwise, that’s for damn sure.
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