NBA news at noon: Kidd has to be kidding

The news of today is the stuff of true tragedy, involving powerplays, betrayals, and much hubris or (as my highschool English textbook put it) overweening pride.  It features money, madness, and characters referred to only by the menacing moniker of “the Russians.”  In short, it’s the best kind of news, in that it is not news at all really but a tall tale that has already occurred, the consequences of which we are just beginning to see play out.

It boils down to this: Jason Kidd went and embroiled himself in an imbroglio.

The story as reported by the Tim Bontemps of the New YorkPost, followed up by Adrian Wojnarowski at Yahoo Sports, and originally broke by some strange person on the internet two days before either of these two entities got to it, to the initial disbelief of everyone who heard it, goes like so: Apparently Jason Kidd saw what was going on with the Knicks, saw what player coaches were getting salarywise (Kerr, Fisher, etc.), saw what was happening with Doc Rivers and with Stan Van Gundy where they were given not only control of the team but of the entirety of basketball operations as well, and started feeling green.

So he apparently got on the phone with the owner of the Nets, Mikhail Prokorov, and began raising his voice.  Only, you don’t raise your voice to Mikhail Prokorov.  Talk at first centered around raising Kidd’s salary, which to him, the president, seemed reasonable.  I say “to him,” because however objectively reasonable the request was, if there is one thing Mikhail Prokorov will always think reasonable, it is that salary prices don’t matter.  You can always chuck more money at a person if they want it, no problem.

The problem comes when you want not only more money but more power.  And this was really what Kidd, according to the story, began to want as well.  Micky would have none of this.  Kidd, then, would have none of that.  And that’s when the voice began to raise.

And that’s when Kidd got the boot.  And that’s when the Bucks magically—almost as if the Nets contacted them!—swept in and asked whether Kidd was available to do some work at the management level.  And that’s when the Nets said, of course he is.

So currently Kidd is in the process of being “hired away” by the Bucks, as Wojnarowski put it.  And the Nets are bringing in someone they wanted for quite a while now, Lionel Hollins, to coach the team next year.

Apparently Kidd wasn’t so bold as to ask for the current GM of the Nets Billy King to be done away with and sent packing.  Kidd just wanted to be placed higher up on the hierarchy than him, get all the same perks, exercise more power, and to basically do his job.  No, he wasn’t that bold at all!

But, putting sarcasm aside for the moment, that’s the essential thing about the whole story: like many other things Kidd has done throughout his long career, it wasn’t necessary at all for him to do this, but he damned well done and did it.

I said hubris was “overweening pride,” but that can mean several things, many of which don’t initially look like they involve pride.  Self-destructiveness, being intent on abasement of oneself, doesn’t usually look like it involves something like excessive self-regard, self-interest, or tyrannical tendencies.  It would seem to be the exact opposite.  But in the denial of the importance of oneself is indeed a denial of the value of the world around one as well, and to deny the value of everything, is to deny that it could have any meaning for anyone else.  It is a selfish act, one of the most self-regarding, self-centered acts there are.

Kidd did a serviceable job as a coach, let that not be forgotten in all the hubbub.  He witnessed the collapse of their team early on with the injury to Lopez, and reworked the roster into something special by capitalizing upon the shift this necessitated.  He shaped the offense into something watchable, and in the end made Nets into a second-round contender (I know it is hard to disregard the fact that this was historically bad East, and in the West the team wouldn’t even see the post-season, but try for a moment, I implore you--we’re trying to eulogize a dead man here).  And he was a solid in-game coach, actually, making adjustments in those playoffs that were not horrible.

But self-destruction is an act of pride, and it if there’s too much pride to be found, a tragic ending won’t be far off in the future.