Time for this Kidd to walk the plank
by
, 07-01-2014 at 02:16 PM (5605 Views)
A year ago, Jason Kidd retired as a player to become a 1st-time head coach with the Brooklyn Nets. The team he left, the New York Knicks, floundered and failed to repeat as division champs, while Kidd took the Nets to the 2nd round of the playoffs.
So what would possess Kidd, on his 2nd go-round with the Nets organization, to pursue more power so soon? Who did he think he was? Pat Riley? Phil Jackson? Please. On June 30, Brooklyn divested itself of Kidd, who will get booed out of the Barclays Center next season for sure, in exchange for 2 2015 draft picks from the Milwaukee Bucks, who in turn dismissed Larry Drew, another ex-player-turned-coach in his first year, but was far inferior. The media paints Drew as having 0 clue as to what was happening.
What further rankled Kidd was the fact that new Knicks coach Derek Fisher, late of Oklahoma City, and Steve Kerr, who ankled the Knicks in favor of Golden State, were making more money as first-time coaches than he was. Jealousy, then, reared its ugly head, as it seems to do every so often with Kidd. A case can be made, then, that Drew was, well, blindsided by the Bucks' new ownership in favor of Kidd. Granted that Kidd was dealing with a different Nets owner than the one who'd traded him away a decade ago, but current owner Mikhail Prokharov should've known something like this would happen.
Let this, then, be a case study in case a current player, such as, say for example, LeBron James, decides to move into coaching after his career is over and starts showing symptoms of a diva-like attitude similar to Kidd's. James already has an entourage of glad-handing idiots who've leeched off him for like forever and make decisions on his behalf, perhaps on their own, it would seem, that tarnish his image. He'd have to lose that crowd before swapping his uniform for a suit & tie. Kidd doesn't have that kind of entourage, just the "Me, myself, & I" attitude he's always had. Hmmmmm. "Me, Myself, & I" was a hit for De La Soul in the 80's, and Beyonce (different lyrics) about a decade ago. Beyonce's husband, Jay-Z, traded his stake in Nets ownership to be an agent. Had he not done so, would Kidd still be in Brooklyn, with Jay-Z as a buffer? We'll never know.