Report: Jason Kidd to return to the Milwaukee Bucks sideline
Jason Kidd is apparently readying his return to the Milwaukee Bucks. The MKE head coach has been out of commission since the third week of December following hip surgery. Bucks assistant Joe Prunty has gone 8-7 in his time leading the team, a sharp improvement upon Kidd’s 11-18 start.
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ESPN’s Marc Stein has the report:
Milwaukee Bucks coach Jason Kidd is returning to the bench to resume his coaching duties next week, league sources told ESPN on Thursday.
Kidd, who underwent hip surgery shortly before Christmas, plans to return next week — ahead of schedule — as the Bucks return from a four-game road trip that still has stops Friday and Saturday in Houston and New Orleans.
The Bucks have struggled mightily in 2015-16, but they’ve won three consecutive games – all quality wins, including a home conquest over Atlanta and impressive road wins over Charlotte and Miami. As such, despite the poor start, the team is just 3.5 games out of the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. Milwaukee would have to leapfrog four other teams in order to catch the eighth-seeded (and struggling) Boston Celtics, but no league observer would claim that the Bucks don’t have the talent to accomplish as much.
Milwaukee surprised in making the postseason during 2014-15 in Kidd’s first season at coaching the team, but the squad has fallen off considerably in the year since. A stout defensive club last season, the squad now boasts the league’s second worst defense as adding dodgy defenders in Jabari Parker and Greg Monroe to the lineup has affected the team’s ability to contest shots and clear the defensive glass. Meanwhile, point guard Michael Carter-Williams has not turned the corner in ways that Kidd anticipated when he dealt for him 11 months ago.
John Hammond, technically, is the team’s general manager, but as The Vertical’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported earlier this month (as transcribed by Dan Feldman at Pro Basketball Talk), Kidd has assumed “final say”-duties on all transactions:
“Jason Kidd has left the team for apparently six weeks to two months to have hip surgery. A lot of people around the league and people I talked to in the aftermath of this wonder, given Kidd’s penchant in the past to bail on things when they get difficult – could this be the beginning of Kidd’s escape hatch to maybe just moving up to a full-time role in the front office, whether he finishes up coaching this year and then tries to move up next year? He goes to Milwaukee with the title of head coach, but since the day Jason has arrived there, he’s been in charge of personnel. That’s not a secret.
[…]
“How do long do they entrust Jason Kidd with the future of this organization. Will they allow him here just to move into a complete front-office and maybe hire his own coach?”
It would be yet another shifty-yet-understandable move for Kidd to leverage his personal relationship with the team’s ownership group, not unlike his attempts to reportedly oust Billy King as Brooklyn Nets GM (while acting as head coach) and take over his gig, before eventually fleeing Brooklyn to become coach of the team with the league’s worst record the season before in June, 2014.
Kidd saw the writing on the wall with that franchise, and hopped out at the exact right moment. If he were to punt the head coaching duties of the Bucks to Joe Prunty (a well-respected and highly capable head coach) full time, it would also be an understandable (if not similarly distasteful) move.
The NBA grind is real. Jason Kidd went from playing massive minutes as a player, for 19 seasons, directly into working with the Nets. Most celebrated ex-players take some time off following retirement, rehabbing old wounds prior to easing into whatever their next life sets up for them. Kidd took no such break, and it makes sense that he wouldn’t want to keep up the “sweats at shootaround during the day, stomping around the sidelines at night”-grind.
Orlando’s Scott Skiles said all former players experience some kind of pain – and maybe some fears they’ll end up like Kidd.
‘’I don’t know anybody that doesn’t,” he said. ”I didn’t play 50,000-plus minutes like Jason did, and I certainly didn’t have anywhere near the type of career that he had, but yeah, I would say all ex-players feel it.
”You’re always worried about what he’s going through. A knee replacement, a hip replacement, something like that going on at some point, and you just cross your fingers, try to stay healthy, and hope it doesn’t happen to you.”
Coaches are given advice on how to prevent it. Dallas coach Rick Carlisle said the National Basketball Coaches Association has wellness consultants and other specialists who talk to the members about health and fitness.
”We’re always sending out emails to our guys on diet, things that they should be doing, things to check,” Carlisle said. ”As president of the coaches association, I encourage our guys to get full physicals every year. I get one. You know, it’s a hard business, it’s a challenging business and so you’ve got to watch your health and you’ve got to work at your health.”
Will Joe Prunty’s relative success as interim coach give Kidd all the material he needs to pitch a full-time move upstairs? That remains to be seen.
What we do know is that the Milwaukee Bucks continue to act a rather odd team, both on court and off.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
