On the 30-year anniversary of receiving Miami’s first-round pick for tampering with their coach, Pat Riley, the Knicks appear poised to celebrate by tampering with Mavericks coach Jason Kidd. How does New York’s first-round pick sound in exchange?
That’s an easy one. It sounds terrible. The Mavericks should do everything they can to keep it from happening, not just refuse the Knicks permission to talk to Kidd, then lose him anyway, then win some kind of compensation package. They really need to keep Jason Kidd. And not just because if Kidd goes, we are a Bruce Bochy retirement away from Brian Schottenheimer having the most tenure among the four major pro coaches in the area.
I think Mavs management is smart enough to recognize this. I say that with some trepidation, given the manner in which this team fell from NBA finalist to draft lottery winner in a single season. Kidd has coached four seasons here, been to two conference finals and one NBA Finals. His résumé is almost like Pete DeBoer’s which, come to think of it, is a terrible way of explaining why Dallas needs to keep him right now.
Better way to say it? Kidd has won five playoff series, same as Rick Carlisle did in 13 years here.
I know there is a large part of the Mavericks’ fan base that would relish the opportunity to get rid of Kidd, especially if you get something in return. He doesn’t call timeouts to stop other team’s runs, he makes weird substitutions, his plays at the end of regulation don’t always follow logic. I believe if you watch any particular team’s games often enough, you come up with similar complaints about the head coach. This isn’t college. A really good NBA team loses 30 times a year. Why not blame the coach?
But beyond his four-year run here, which looks awfully good to me, there’s one huge plus for keeping Kidd. Kyrie Irving likes him, likes to play for him, believes in him. If you think you can just automatically fix that by finding another former great point guard, ask Steve Nash about that. The only hope that this reconstruction on the part of GM Nico Harrison will work relies on Anthony Davis staying healthy and Irving getting healthy and remaining happy. Then Cooper Flagg has to be as great as everyone says, and away the Mavs go in 2026-27, just in time before the clock runs out on their two best players.
Kidd may or may not have bought into the Luka trade. We will probably never know if his “eleventh hour” answer to questions about when he knew Doncic was about to be traded for Davis are sincere. What we do know is how long Nico left him hanging last year as the team spokesman in favor of the deal. That left Kidd to say silly things like “trades happen, they are part of life” as if they were the same as injuries.
Why do the Knicks want him? Jalen Brunson likes him. I , after the team’s last practice before leaving for Utah for Kidd’s first playoff game as a coach here, Kidd standing on the practice court talking to Brunson for more than 20 minutes. Doncic wasn’t going to play in the first game and, as it turned out, would actually miss the first three. I don’t know what wisdom Kidd imparted, but Brunson shined and outplayed Donovan Mitchell, averaging 32 points in those three games as Dallas took a 2-1 lead.
I don’t know if Brunson liked Tom Thibodeau or not, and I don’t get firing a coach that gets the Knicks to their first Eastern Conference finals in 25 years, but that’s where we are in sports. The teams that get close but not across the finish line have a tendency to lean on coaching changes as the final piece of the puzzle. If the Stars players’ reactions to the benching of Jake Oettinger can get DeBoer fired, then it’s not hard to figure the importance of hiring or, in the Mavericks’ case, retaining a coach that relates to the players. The NBA is much more of a governed-by-players league than the NHL, and that’s why losing Kidd — for a team that has decided that Irving must be one of the two or now three centerpieces — sounds like such a bad idea.
Kidd has two more years on his contract. He can’t just walk away and start coaching the Knicks. Riley had to resign from New York and then sign later with the Heat, and the Knicks still lost a first-round pick and $1 million. Wonder how much money it would be 30 years later?
Kidd has won those five playoff rounds in four years even with the team being fined by the NBA for tanking in 2023 and with last season falling apart after the Luka deal through massive injuries. Now, the Mavericks have been gifted with a golden opportunity to recover from a really bad trade by replacing Luka with Flagg, essentially free of charge.
I wouldn’t mess around and let the Knicks walk away with Kidd. This was a long shot that Harrison was betting on to begin with in building around Davis and Irving, and it took Dallas winning the lottery to even give the team a chance. Because of Irving, Kidd is an important piece of that puzzle. The Mavericks can’t let him slip away to New York the way they let Brunson do it three years ago.
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