The Bucks fired Jason Kidd in January.
Why?
Howard Beck of Bleacher Report:
Team officials cringed as Kidd repeatedly blamed the Bucks’ youth for their struggles—an assertion he repeated in mid-January, just days before his dismissal.
“It was constantly, ‘Hey, it was the players’ fault—they’re not doing this, they’re not doing that, they’re too young,'” a Bucks source says.
Sources both inside and outside the organization say Kidd had a tendency to fall in and out of love with players—e.g., demanding a trade for Michael Carter-Williams one day, burying him the next.
Team officials had also grown concerned that Kidd’s demanding, old-school style had worn thin. Players were tuning Kidd out—or already had last season, according to one source with close ties to the team.
Kidd was “putting in massive hours,” a Bucks source says, “and he expected the players” to do the same. “Jason was driving the team a bit hard. And that would have been fine if there was really good results.”
“When people are saying that I’m old-school, it’s not that I’m old-school,” he says. “It’s what it takes to win. And I think we’ve lost a little of that with the younger generation of ‘everybody gets a trophy.'”
The “hard-ass” charges seem to befuddle Kidd—”Because I don’t smile enough during the game? Or do I not smile enough during practice?”—and he insists, “It’s just competition.”
“Maybe I didn’t explain it fully—young is for everyone,” he says. “The owners are young. And they’re going to make mistakes. … So they win 41, as a new owner, what happens?”
(Answer: They expect a steady, continued rise.)
“Doesn’t work that way,” Kidd says. “The master plan got erased once we won 41 games. Because the expectations were, ‘This is what we can do every year.’ But no one’s ever been in this situation but one person, and that’s the head coach. And the head coach is saying, ‘We still have a ways to go.’ But no one is listening.”
This is part of an excellent feature on Kidd, which includes more details about his time in Milwaukee and Brooklyn. I suggest reading it in full. The Nets details color things we only had rough outlines on.
As a player, Kidd was known as a coach-killer. It appears some of those same tendencies did him in as a coach.
Kidd handled his business as much as he could individually. But he didn’t put in enough effort to understand where everyone else was coming from or how he came across.
Working relentlessly is exhausting, physically and mentally. Some people are more internally driven to do it. Others need external motivation – which, on a basketball team, a coach can deliver. Kidd is probably more self-motivated and hardened than most. But it’s no sin of his players if they needed more encouragement. Just criticizing them doesn’t work. That’s a far more effective tactic when used only occasionally in a relationship with a strong foundation. Hard to build that stronger foundation when rarely smiling or oscillating on players or railing against an entire generation with the lame “participation trophies” argument.
Kidd makes a good point about the organization being young. Though roster is only somewhat young, general manager Jon Horst is in his first year, and Marc Lasry and Wes Edens are among the NBA’s newest owners.
But Kidd always sounded self-serving when discussing the team’s youth. It sounded like an excuse for why he should keep his job even the results weren’t good enough. Maybe he didn’t explain his point well enough. Maybe he’s reworking it so it sounds better now.
Either way, the result is the same: Kidd is out of a job. Whether he deserves another is a great lens through which to read Beck’s article.
