The day Kenny Atkinson was fired the Nets beat the shit out of the Spurs, 139-120. It was March 6, 2020. Brooklyn stood at 28-34 with 20 games left in the season (or so they thought), a playoff team in the East, respectable when you consider their recently signed superstars, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant, had played a total of 20 games, all by Kyrie (then on the shelf for the remainder of the season following shoulder surgery), as Durant was still rehabbing the achilles tendon he ruptured in Game 5 of the prior year’s NBA Finals, as a Golden State Warrior.
GM Sean Marks and team owner Joe Tsai were diplomatic, giving credit to Atkinson for turning the franchise around not just in record, but in culture, which is allegedly what led the aforementioned pair of contrarian superstars to come to Brooklyn over Manhattan in the first place. And yet, Kenny had to go. In the post-mortems, there was talk of Atkinson’s waning voice in the locker room, in his failure to define roles on the team, but really, his cardinal sin was refusing to start a completely washed DeAndre Jordan over Jarrett Allen, going against his stars’ wishes.
I’m going to repeat that quickly if the full force of that statement didn’t land as I intended, because we all know this but history will assume there had to be some other shit going on at the time. There was not: KENNY ATKINSON WAS FIRED FROM HIS POSITION AS HEAD COACH OF THE BROOKLYN NETS FOR NOT STARTING DEANDRE JORDAN OVER JARRETT ALLEN.
This will go down as the nadir of the player empowerment era — which appears to be nearing a close in the aftermath of the NBA Players Union speeding its demise with a CBA that should be thrown out by the Supreme Court in spite of the players willingly participating in its consecration — and of course the victim was Kenny, the antithesis of this sort of diva-ish, fuck-the-team-start-my-friend, player-using-every-ounce-of-leverage-simply-because-they-can meddling. It is fairly obvious there was little Atkinson could do to survive. Durant and Irving wanted to flex institutional power, which meant hand-selecting their own coach, and they eventually did, going with current Mind the Game podcast co-host Steve Nash over current Coach of the Year Atkinson.
Kenny Atkinson is an Irish 57-year-old from Huntington (Long Island). He both dresses and sounds like a Freeport fishmonger. He’s listed as six feet tall, which means he’s 5’11 at best and his playing weight never exceeded 160 pounds in soaking wet cargo shorts. He looks like a guy who has seen Billy at the Garden over a dozen times and doesn’t own a boat, but has a rod named “Alexa”. His early life was dedicated to the pursuit of playing basketball, his adult life has been dedicated to coaching it. He played high school ball at St. Anthony’s High —a program described by the New York Post as “a Long Island powerhouse” — for an Adam Sandler character named Gus Alferi.
All little Kenny wanted was to hoop for St. Johns, which led him to playing a prep year in Maine, then settling for the Colonial Athletic Association’s University of Richmond in Virginia. The highlight of his playing career came early, in 1988, when Kenny’s Spiders upset Bob Knight’s reigning champion Indiana Hoosiers in the NCAA tournament. From there, he almost made Larry Brown’s Spurs, almost made Matt Guokas’ Orlando Magic, but never broke through. He bounced around the minor leagues of professional basketball in America during the pre-G-League Jurassic period. Then he spent 10 years in Europe, never playing for the same team more than one season. The stats tell the story of an unexceptional pass-first point guard who was maxing out his extremely limited potential and should probably have considered taking a flier on joining a local ironworker union or stonemason union back in LI. But Atkinson is a man who clearly has basketball in his blood and would never have considered any other career path, a true testament to the idea that if you dedicate yourself single-mindedly to anything your entire life, you actually can achieve it at the highest level.
Atkinson’s subsequent coaching CV reads like something out of le Carré: Director of player development for both the Paris Basket Racing Club and the Republic of Georgia’s national team, then an assistant coach for Ukraine at the 2011 Euro Championships, and head coach of the Dominican Republic’s national team. He was a mercenary fanatic who went wherever there was basketball to coach. I like to imagine that in France, his fellow coaches taught him how to delicately crack the caramelized shell of a crème brulee, and he taught them how to pick blue point oysters out of a mud bank.
Eventually, as an NBA assistant, Atkinson had gigs from Houston to New York to Atlanta over the course of eight seasons. What you hear over and over again when players, former coaches, and assistant coaches talk about Atkinson is that he’s maniacally competitive, intense and ultra prepared, dedicated to every aspect of the game, to improving players who are already the best in the world and have succeeded at the highest levels. There’s no signature style or strategy he brings with him from job to job, when he was assisting coaches as polarized and polarizing as Mike D’Antoni and Mike Budenholzer. He’s an executive chef who will roll up his sleeves and wash dishes if that’s the service required on a given night.
Jeremy Lin asks for tape, to see how an opposing team defense handled switching him off a pick and roll at one o’clock in the morning. Kenny has the tape in Lin’s locker by 6 AM. Al Horford would settle for pulling up and popping, Kenny pushed him to put the ball on the floor. What Atkinson clearly excels at was his former job- as a director/guru of player development- not taking any player on his roster for granted, and through manic obsession and tireless dedication, working to draw out the best possible version of your game, demonstrating to the player in question you give a shit about them and the team and are willing to do more than pay that concept lip service, to work as hard as you expect them to. As no less an authority than DeAndre Jordan once said, “Kenny’s crazy, man. He’s crazy, in a good way. He’s very competitive. And he has that East Coast, like, New Yorker — he’s from Jersey, right? He has that kind of attitude about him and that gets us fired up.” This is how a scrappy nobody from Long Island becomes respected in a world he has no business being in: by earning it, by being undeniable.
Atkinson and Sean Marks came to the smoking husk that was Barclays together, still mired in the devastation of the 2013 Celtics heist, and in short order took the closest thing the NBA had to The Mighty Ducks (dir. Stephen Herek, 1992) — Caris Levert, Spencer Dinwiddie, D’Angelo Russell, Joe Harris Jarrett Allen, and several part time Lyft drivers — and turned them into a playoff team.
He resurrected the franchise from a 20-62 disaster to a respectable 42-40 with no draft picks over the course of three seasons before hitting what looked like a jackpot, but was actually his death knell.
Atkinson chose well following his exit from Brooklyn, both in the jobs he took and the jobs he passed on. He worked as an assistant under Ty Lue in LA, then Steve Kerr in San Francisco, and was on the bench when the Warriors won the still-shocking fourth ring of the Steph era. The next season he made the practically unheard of decision to turn down a head coaching position with the Charlotte Hornets after he was chosen to fill the position (there were reports it came down to haggling over assistant coaching budget). And then finally, he moved to Ohio, a now obvious plum head coaching position that wasn’t obvious at the time Atkinson took it.
Atkinson’s specialty is working with point guards, so it makes sense he finally chose wine and gold as his blood type. From a distance, you could view this year’s Cleveland Cavaliers as an island of misfit toys, when they were actually a team with tremendous potential, full of young horses all on similar timelines, completed with the addition of the rarest of NBA assets, a disgruntled star in his prime who needed a fresh start. But after a few runs, it looked like Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland would never mesh, that maybe the young lottery big Evan Mobley’s ceiling was closer to Stromile Swift than Kevin Garnett. His interview for the gig was classic Kenny: A powerpoint presentation with annotated charts and color-coded sticky notes, Zodiac-level whiteboards and an hour of clips, all exclusively dedicated to unlocking Mobley, who made the All-Star team and was recently named Defensive Player of the Year.
One of the great quandaries of this season that philosophers will wonder about for decades is how JB Bickerstaff led this nearly exact same team to the unsatisfying basement of their potential. Then he left, and was replaced by Kenny, who coached the team into a league-leading regular season powerhouse, while JB went to Detroit and in one season tripled their win total. Proof that in the NBA, every fit is different and styles make fights. Apparently what Atkinson brought to the Cavs was levity. He calls Golden State his “finishing school”, where under Steve Kerr he saw a team fully bought into the culture of joy (No word on the veracity of this claim from Jonathan Kuminga or Jordan Poole, but we will update as this story continues to develop). The Cavs make fun of each other, make fun of themselves, compete in high-stakes meat-off competitions — and with a little continuity now that Mitchell extended with Cleveland and has stopped looking for ways home to New York — they’ve gelled, thanks to Kenny, who injected some old-fashioned Long Island ball-breaking.
The Cavs got out of rote, predictable PnR spamming iso-ball and now employ a motion offense that sounds in league with Kerr’s beautiful game, with perhaps a dash of the coach Mikes Atkinson once trained under, a rich soup that made for a record-setting explosive Cleveland offense. It’s all possible because Mitchell sacrificed some usage to incorporate Garland and get him back to the level of tantalizing promise he exhibited before Mitchell’s arrival. The Cavs are one of the deepest teams in the league and they now actually utilize that strength, playing 10-11 deep (especially since adding De’Andre Hunter at the deadline, a major act of aggression in their arms race with the Celtics). It was one of those magic seasons in which every player had a career year, unlocking new abilities and aspects of their game.
And how apt, how beautiful that Atkinson at last finds a home reunited with the backup center that cost him his first head coaching job. In his Cleveland interview, he was pressed on whether he thought the Cavs’ big lineup of Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley could continue to share the floor. He believed they could, going so far as to block trade interest from other teams when they came inquiring about Allen, and he’s been right, with Allen seeing his minutes cut slightly, but turning in the best efficiency numbers of his career. He’s been Kenny’s on-court avatar, who takes his benchings down the stretch in the fourth, or starting when everyone else sits out, with grace. It’s the type of relationship, built over years, through trust you earn, by being undeniable.
The Cavs will need all Atkinson’s strategy and chemistry to win four of their next five games, facing a dangerous Pacers squad featuring Tyrese Halliburton, who has apparently sold his soul to a nocturnal Irish musician. If they do, it will be a testament to the power of coaching, and the years Atkinson spent in the trenches fulfilling his destiny.
