Brooklyn Nets: Kenny Atkinson’s dismissal signals change of direction

On Saturday morning the Brooklyn Nets announced they were parting ways with head coach Kenny Atkinson. This signals a major change of direction for the team.

On Saturday morning ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski announced that the Brooklyn Nets and head coach Kenny Atkinson were mutually parting ways. In his fourth year with the organization, Atkinson has a record of 118-190, but the wins and losses don’t tell the whole story.

Atkinson took over a Nets franchise bereft of talent and a future after a devastating trade by the previous front office regime. The Nets had no players and no draft picks and no way of getting either, but what they had was a brilliant young head coach and a savvy new front office led by general manager Sean Marks.

It seemed like a match made in heaven, and in many ways it really was. They went 20-62 in his 2016-17, his first season. This was a team led in scoring by Brook Lopez, most likely the best player on the entire roster that year.

The summer before, the Nets turned Thaddeus Young into a second-round draft pick, which they used on Michigan’s Caris LaVert, and that move signaled that their front office was shrewd and that they had faith in their coaching staff to develop a young prospect and their medical staff to bring him along after missing extensive time at Michigan with multiple stress fractures in his left foot.

It was a bold move, and it cemented the Nets in the eyes of observers as an up-and-coming organization, a far cry from the incompetent bunch that left the franchise in ruins.

Fast forward to the summer of 2019. By this point, the level of synergy and craft between Atkinson and Marks was evident. They were on the ascent, winning 28 games in Atkinson’s second year and an astonishing 42 games last season.

Atkinson’s resume was full of Nets reclamation projects. LaVert had turned into a productive NBA player (incidentally, his last two games included a 51 point explosion and a triple-double for the Brooklyn Nets).

Jarrett Allen was a third-year big who may be on the verge of stardom if not for a certain player whose presence was thrust upon the organization (more on that later), and Spencer Dinwiddie has grown from being a player who was given up on twice in the same summer by the Detroit Pistons and the Chicago Bulls to be a cold-blooded killer late in games. Joe Harris developed into one of the most lethal shooters in the NBA.

Does any of this happen without Atkinson? Maybe. Does all of it? Probably not.

In the summer of 2019, the package deal of Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant and DeAndre Jordan signed with the Brooklyn Nets. In many ways, Irving was the price of doing business with Durant, and Jordan was a requirement in order to seal the pact.

Jordan hasn’t been a massive negative on the floor by any means, but his presence does complicate Allen’s trajectory. Durant has missed this season with a ruptured Achilles tendon, as was expected, and Kyrie Irving’s presence has been complicated as one would generally expect.

We won’t delve into his comments or reports over the course of the season, but it does seem as though there was a weak link in the relationship between front office, players and coach and this report from Stefan Bondy of the New York Daily News indicates just such a thing:

Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai wasn’t asking Caris LaVert and Joe Harris or polling the organization about what to do with Kenny Atkinson, a coach who had led an injury-ravaged team which was actually a full point better without Kyrie Irving than with him to the playoffs.

An owner will consult his stars, if anything, when considering what to do about a coach who has led them out of the wilderness to the brink of greatness. If Durant and Irving wanted him, he would stay. Clearly one or both of them do not, however, and now the best coach on the market is the one the Brooklyn Nets just fired.