The Brooklyn Nets have fired head coach Lionel Hollins and reassigned general manager Billy King elsewhere within the organization. Assistant coach Tony Brown will take over as the interim head coach for the remainder of the season, and the general manager position will remain vacant until the offseason.
Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov has decided to shake things up in Brooklyn after a 10-27 start to the season. Expectations were low for the 2015-16 season, but clearly ownership expected more than just 10 wins by this point in the season.
Lionel Hollins went 48-71 during his one and a half seasons as head coach of the Brooklyn Nets, which included a trip to the playoffs last season. As the eighth seed, Hollins and the Nets fell in six games to the top seeded Atlanta Hawks. With a roster lacking so much talent this year, it’s tough to blame Hollins for Brooklyn’s troubles, but at the same time, it was time to make a change on the sidelines.
Billy King served as the Nets general manager since 2010, and it appears as if he will remain a part of the organization in some minor role until his contract runs out at the end of the season. After many trades geared towards Brooklyn’s “win-now” mentality, the Nets now appear to be stuck at the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings for the foreseeable future. King often took blame for the trades the Nets made, but was it really his fault? Ownership was the driving force behind many of the team’s transactions, including the infamous trade with the Boston Celtics for Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Jason Terry in which the Nets gave up three first round draft picks. In 2012, King also traded a first round pick to the Portland Trailblazers for Gerald Wallace. Who did the Blazers select with that draft pick? Yep, you guessed it, All-Star point guard Damian Lillard.
Ownership’s thought process was very clear; when the team moved to Brooklyn, they wanted to put a winning product on the court right away in order to gain the interest of a new fan base in Brooklyn. If that meant sacrificing future assets for current players, then Prokhorov was all for it. In the short term, one could argue that strategy worked to a certain degree, as the Nets made the playoffs three straight years and formed an identity much better than whatever they had in New Jersey. But now, the seats of the Barclays Center are never filled and the product on the court is a disaster.
The Nets once had a vision to build a team full of superstars surrounding point guard Deron Williams. That obviously never happened, and the franchise now sits at its lowest point since the team went 12-70 in 2010. How will the team build a future without controlling its own first round draft pick until 2019? Will Prokhorov make a run at John Calipari or Tom Thibodeau this summer? Times are tough in Brooklyn, as the Nets have officially hit rock bottom.
