Five wins in six games, and it's beginning to look as though Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov gave the team's faithful a late Christmas gift by firing coach Avery Johnson back on December 27th. "If I say the timing was good, that's a reflection back on coach [Johnson]," Reggie Evans told us after the Nets' 113-93 win over the Sacramento Kings on Saturday night. "Avery was a good coach, [I] wish he would've never gotten fired. It was just a matter of, we were overcome in the shadow, the dark cloud, no matter how you look at it."
The skeptic points to a soft schedule, the full return of Brook Lopez, and the vast improvement in Joe Johnson's shooting percentage as the reasons for the immediate improvements. The optimist sees a team who has yet to lose in 2013 with a new sense of urgency under interim coach P.J. Carlesimo. Either way, the move has helped erase much of the sting from the 3-10 run they were on before coach Johnson was let go.
As Evans quote implies, Johnson was well-liked in the locker room, but the fans were starting to turn on their under-performing, high-priced back court of Joe Johnson and "coach killer" Deron Williams. In the NBA, the timing of such moves are almost as important as the men involved, prompting one to ponder if Johnson's firing was a premeditated move by Prokhorov and GM Billy King; necessitated by failure on the court, but a lifeline they always had in their back pocket nonetheless.
It might seem like the type of underhanded, backroom dealings you'd expect to find in the pages of a Brooklyn Knight comic book (or at the Kremlin). But the move seems less draconian when you account for the fact the team was in the midst of a slide from second to eighth place in the conference led by a coach who was in the last year of his contract.
P.J. Carlesimo calling out a play during Saturday's game (Brooklyn Nets)
The Nets were teetering precariously on the edge of the playoff race and drowning in the New York media war with the conference-best Knicks. Their star player, having the worst statistical season of his career, publicly criticized his coach a week prior and had just given about as little effort as you could in a nationally televised home loss on Christmas day to Boston. A game so bad, fourth quarter chants of "Let's go Celtics!" were raining down from the Barclay's Center rafters.
The team needed a defibrillator, not platitudes about being a .500 team or back-to-back Coach of the Month awards.
"It woke us up," Williams admitted after the Kings game. "I think guys are definitely getting their confidence back, and we're getting our confidence back as a team."
Removing a player's coach like Johnson was bound to send a message, and management's quotes explaining the move did little to sugarcoat it. King called it an "ownership decision." Prokhorov only released a written statement offering his "thanks to Avery for his efforts and to wish him every success in the future."
And why not? Organizationally speaking, the Nets aren't much different than they were two weeks ago. They're still without a head coach under contract and will most likely pursue a big name in the off season. So facing the prospects of fading into irrelevancy this season, ownership pulled the ripcord.
Not only have their fortunes changed in the W-L column, rising back to sixth place in the conference, Brooklyn has won back some of the all-important New York headlines. Throwing around names like Phil Jackson, Jerry Sloan and Jeff Van Gundy will do that. And in the meantime you have a former head coach trying to re-emerge on a national stage while fighting hard against that "interim" prefix.
Sure, wins over Charlotte, Cleveland, and a double-overtime affair against the league-worst Washington Wizards won't turn many heads, but a double-digit victory over the league-best Oklahoma City Thunder will. Then came Saturday's thrashing against the "surging" Kings. Sacramento came into the Barclay's Center winners of five of their last six games.
The Nets never trailed past midway into the first quarter, and were playing their reserves midway through the fourth.
"I think it was an eye opener when coach got let go," Williams said. "We knew we were capable of playing better, we just, for some reason we couldn't get out of the rut we were in, and that kind of woke us up."
And isn't that what Brooklyn fans wanted all along, to see their team awake from the month-long slumber they were in heading into Christmas morning? Now the Nets enter the new year with the "dark cloud" in the distance, and the conversation back to where it was before December: playoffs.
