The Brooklyn Nets fired Lionel Hollins last Sunday, and it sounds like the team doesn't miss him. Here's a doozy of a sentence from the Bergen Record's Andy Vasquez: "Several sources around the team couldn’t name a single Nets player who liked Hollins."
Yikes.
According to the Record, players didn't have a problem with Hollins' game plan, but many thought he was condescending. Those who talked back to him were put in the doghouse. More:
Wednesday night, after the Nets beat the Knicks with a fourth-quarter surge, Thaddeus Young was asked about interim coach Tony Brown’s focus on positivity — something Hollins was never known for. His answer was telling.
"It’s huge. When your coach is not panicking and he’s staying positive and he’s continued to motivate us, it’s huge for us as far as an energy standpoint," Young said. "It makes us want to continue to go out there and continue to play, and it doesn’t keep us thinking about what’s happening before as much."
…
"Our tendencies before was we were harping on the fact that we were giving up leads and we were harping on the fact that we had some plays where we turned the ball over," Young said. "But [Brown’s] mentality is: ‘Forget about what happened before this, and let’s try to make a push and try to win this game.’ That’s huge for us as a team. It says a lot that he believes in us, that he wants us to compete, he believes that we can continue to win the game at any point."
Hollins appeared understandably frustrated by his team this year, and it sounds like the team was understandably tired of it. I wonder, though, just how long this apparent honeymoon with Tony Brown will last. The 11-28 Nets have only played two games since Hollins' dismissal -- a 106-79 blowout loss at the hands of the San Antonio Spurs and a 110-104 win over the New York Knicks -- so there's no way to know whether or not the coaching change will have a tangible effect on their results. Generally, when there's losing in the NBA, there is negativity. With this Brooklyn team, there could be much, much more losing.
