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Kenny Atkinson turned Brooklyn Nets firing into motivation that led to Coach of the Year

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Indiana Pacers v Cleveland Cavaliers
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Kenny Atkinson is the NBA Coach of the Year. How his time in Brooklyn, including his firing got him there.

Tuesday should’ve been a great day for Kenny Atkinson. Indeed, he was officially announced as the NBA Coach of the Year in the morning, a singular achievement, but later in the day, his Cleveland Cavaliers lost in a close one in the second round, putting the East’s best team down 0-2, to the Indiana Pacers. Knowing how competitive Atkinson is, you’d have to think the big moment of the day was the latter event. He hates to lose.

In his story on the award, Brian Lewis quoted Atkinson about just how bad things got in his first two years as head coach of the Brooklyn Nets in 2017 and 2018 when his teams won 21 and 28 games and shuttled marginal players through the new training facility in hopes of hitting on something. With no picks and only a little cap space, it was a bleak time and it took a toll.

“I was a little crazy,” Atkinson recalled to the Post. “I was desperate to make it. I didn’t want to fail. I really got after it, but I knew even after two years in Brooklyn, it was bad for my health. It was almost like we’re at the bottom, we’re the worst team in the league. There was a desperation to get better.”

Then after those two years of misery, the team surprised everyone including ownership and management by winning 42 games in 2018-19 and getting the sixth seed in the East. That success was one of the factors that attracted Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving to fill out the Clean Sweep that June. KD in fact said he had studied Atkinson’s post-game videos and liked what he saw there as well as on the court. But none of that alleviated the anxiety as the superstars didn’t exactly show full support, as Lewis wrote.

After Atkinson called a postgame meeting, Durant — who wasn’t playing — spent much of it ripping the state of the team. Irving was vocal about not needing a hard-driving coach. Atkinson — who was admittedly maniacal in his intensity, furiously pedaling away on his exercise bike while rewatching losses at 4:30 a.m. — was fired before the end of that season.

Similarly, Erik Slater recalls what was going on back then:

“Him and the max guys [Durant and Irving] weren’t necessarily on the same page,” Spencer Dinwiddie told Matt Sullivan in the latter’s book, Can’t Knock the Hustle. “If we’re not all on the same page, then somebody’s gotta go, and it’s not going to be them.”

The Nets tried to cast the departure as a mutual agreement but Atkinson has repeatedly and consistently said it was an outright firing, the end of the GM/head coach combo that had brought the team success, turning a miserable situation around in less than three years. As Stefan Bondy, then covering the Nets for the Daily News, famously tweeted…

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In the aftermath, there was reports that one point of irritation was the superstars’ desire to see their guy, DeAndre Jordan, get starters’ minutes instead of then-emerging big Jarrett Allen. KD didn’t like the roster-building and then there were what one executive described as Kyrie’s “antics” not further detailed. He also refused cortisone shots to help his recurring shoulder woes.

Atkinson has said he was told on exiting Brooklyn that he had not handled the superstar part of his job. That quite obviously changed after his championship stint as an assistant with the superstar-laden Warriors two years later. Moreover, Atkinson has said he’s a better coach as a result of being dumped by the Nets. “Definitely not the same coach I was in Brooklyn,” he said earlier this season.

“I’ve grown a lot. I’ve changed a lot as a coach, which is a good thing. I’ve progressed. I’ve developed,” Atkinson added. “The range of experiences I’ve had from [the] conference finals with the Clippers… obviously Golden State and the championship in 2022. And then the experience I had [last] summer, being in the Olympics (with Team France.) That’s kind of been my philosophy: How many experiences can I get in this league?

“And that was part of the thought process after I got fired in Brooklyn, I was like, ‘Man.’ You’re a little taken aback. And then you’re like, ‘OK, how do we turn this into how can I get better?’ And, luckily, I felt like I’ve made the right decisions.”

The Cavaliers predicament will require a lot of “right decisions” if Atkinson, Allen and Donovan Mitchell are to avoid a shocking post-season exit after racking up 64 regular season wins. For Atkinson, it won’t be the first time he’ll be dealing with a new challenge or gotten beyond it. After all, he didn’t get all those votes for Coach of the Year for nothing.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn is on its third coach in the five years since Atkinson departed. Jordi Fernandez, like Atkinson, is a rookie head coach during a rebuild. Like Atkinson, he was seen as the NBA’s best assistant coach before Sean Marks tapped him. And at some point, still TBD, he’ll be asked to coach a superstar or two. How that works out will likely be a big tell for the organization.