Jacque Vaughn might not have been the Nets’ first choice. It remains to be seen if he’ll end up being the best choice — or the long-term one.
In a move that surprised the NBA, Brooklyn removed the interim tag from Vaughn’s head coach title on Wednesday. And in many ways Kyrie Irving may have done as much to get Vaughn the job as he did to cost Steve Nash his.
With the Nets players not responding to Nash — Irving arguably the most culpable culprit — the team parted ways with the coach on Nov. 1 and continued talks it had already started with suspended Boston coach Im Udoka. But given that Brooklyn was also dealing with the latest Irving drama, two controversies were just one too many.
“Yeah, you just never know in this business,” Nic Claxton told The Post. “We all heard reports that we were supposed to be getting Im within the next couple of days. But we’re excited that JV is our coach. He’s a really good coach. He’s inspiring and I’m ready to get things going.”
While the players tried to avoid contrasting Vaughn with the man he’s replaced, the early results are impossible to ignore.
“I don’t want to compare the two; I feel like both guys are high IQ guys that know the game,” said Kevin Durant, who made news this summer by requesting the Nets trade him or fire Nash. It took seven games, but Brooklyn did the latter. “All the guys have responded to how he wants us to play.
“He simplified a lot of stuff. That’s usually what happens when you start losing games. He started simplifying the offense, defense, just making [it] easy for all of us and putting us all in situations to succeed individually, which is going to help us as a collective. We’ve still got a long road ahead and we’re just going to keep grinding, keep our head down and keep working.”
That simplification has been a theme in speaking with Nets players.
Nash was a two-time MVP and Hall of Famer whose basketball IQ was beyond reproach. But Irving didn’t appear to take to whatever Nash was teaching, while some others might not have been able to absorb it.
Vaughn’s success — other than getting buy-in from Durant and resolution of Irving’s situation — won’t necessarily rest on creativity, but clarity.
“I know one thing about Jacque is he’s locked all the way in,” Markieff Morris said when asked to contrast the duo. “He doesn’t really talk that much; he’s more so focused on getting the game plan, getting stuff done; more of a serious type of coach.”
Switching things up
“[Vaughn is doing] a lot of the same stuff [as Nash]but he’s just maybe kept it even a little bit more simple, cleaned up some different stuff defensively,” added Joe Harris, the longest-tenured Net who arrived with Vaughn in the summer of 2016.
“We are definitely way more of a red-in team or a switching team, one-through-five, both first unit and second unit,” Harris said. “I think there’s a level of clarity there, [and] guys are more aggressive with that clarity. And I think because we’re able to play well defensively, that allows us to get out and have success offensively.”
In layman’s terms, the red coverage is when a defender fronts the low post and a teammate comes over from the weak side to double. It’s common after they switch on a ballscreen, which the Nets do plenty of.
It had been Vaughn that — serving as interim coach in 2020 after Kenny Atkinson’s departure — dragged the Nets away from his predecessor’s favored drop coverage into a switching defense. Nash kept the scheme, but now with a roster more suited to it — with Claxton at center, and adding the likes of Royce O’Neale and Ben Simmons — Vaughn has doubled down.
Brooklyn is not only switching even more than before, but throwing in more red coverage — something the Spurs excelled at over the years. Vaughn, of course, was a San Antonio player, assistant and scout before coming to Brooklyn.
Gregg Popovich and his Spurs won with defense. If Vaughn can get a Durant-led team to at least shore up what had been an abysmally-disorganized defense, Brooklyn should at least be in every game enough to give Durant and Co. a chance.
Let Jacque be Jacque
“He’ll be really hands-on, especially on the defensive end; just us being more aggressive, getting up under guys’ skin more,” Claxton told The Post of Vaughn’s coaching style. That’s the mentality that he played with as well, so he’s going to instill that in us now that it’s his team to run, his show to run. And offensively, hopefully we can just find that flow we’ve been trying to find this year, just getting the ball popping more.”
It’s far too soon to tell if it’ll work. But the early returns are promising.
When Nash was let go on Nov. 1, Brooklyn was just 2-5 and sat next-to-last in defensive rating, third-worst in scoring defense and net rating and 28th in the league in opponent field-goal percentage allowed.
Since Vaughn took over, they’re 3-2 and leading the league in all four categories heading into Friday night. He’s prioritized being more disruptive on defense, leading to transition buckets and early offense.
“It’s just him, his personality. That’s just who he is,” Claxton said. “Yeah, he’s a really good coach. Young as far as being a head coach, but he knows what he’s doing, and we’re just going to follow behind and trust in him.”
For whatever reason, that personality is meshing well with the Nets. Perhaps it’s his six-plus seasons as an assistant with the team building relationships, or maybe just the new coach bump. But for the moment, it’s working.
“Jacque’s been there for a while; he knows all the guys,” one scout told The Post. “It’s not like they’re bringing in a new coach. When you have somebody who knows the players it’s always easier when you’ve got that [relationship].”
“It’s been great from Day 1 he got the interim job,” Seth Curry said. “I didn’t know what would happen, but he came in and was honest with us and just saying, ‘I’m going to work hard every day. Every day they ask me to be the interim head coach, I’m going to come in, I’m going to coach you guys as good as I can.’ That kind of mindset riled the team, that’s kind of the mindset we took on every day.
“[He’s] doing a couple of things scheme-wise. But honestly, it’s just mentality, guys rallying together, bringing more of a competitive mindset as a group. … Just fresh energy. It’s not what Steve did or anything better that Jacque did. It’s just a new change and our season has to get turned around. There are only so many games; guys are playing with that back-to-the wall mentality.”
Built to last?
It’s obvious to see, opposing players and scouts told The Post. Whether it’s Vaughn, or the team adapting to having to play harder and together without the suspended Irving, is up for debate, but the results are not.
“Kyrie isn’t there, so there’s a lot of changes, not just the coach,” an Eastern Conference executive noted. “The team is playing different, but it’s too early to say if it’s just because of the coach or they’re playing different because they don’t have Kyrie now so they’ve got to play a different way. So it could be both.
“They have a lot of injuries, they’ve got a lot of guys coming in and out of the lineup. … They’ve got Ben out and back in, Seth in, so there’s so many variables that it’s tough to say what’s going on. … [But] they look like they’re playing as a team. … it’s interesting.”
It also may not last. Despite being 10-5 with the Nets, including his earlier interim stint, Vaughn was 58-158 in two-plus seasons as the head coach in Orlando. And with his contract only running this season and next, Udoka or another proven winner could loom over his shoulder this offseason.
Unless he has a strong regular-season and postseason.
To do that, the Nets will need to shore up their rebounding percentage. It vaulted from dead last under Nash to 16th in Vaughn’s first five games. That leaves a lot of room for growth, and a key to actual success.
“The ability for us to protect the rim is going to be huge. That’s important as a group, and that’s going to be impacted by the rebounding piece. If we can focus on defensive rebounding, we can take a big jump on the defensive end,” Vaughn said. “We’ve already taken a big jump (defensively), definitely a concerted effort. The fouling, defensive rebounding; we can take another jump.”
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