Outside of the number of NBA players who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 — which includes four Brooklyn Nets players — one of the more surprising developments in the basketball world since play came to a screeching halt at the professional and college level was Rick Pitino’s return to college basketball.
The former New York Knicks head coach saw his tenure at Louisville end in 2017 in the midst of an FBI investigation into college basketball and expressed he was done coaching. Not long after, Pitino took a job coaching professionally in Greece.
Now he’s found his way back to the college game, taking the men’s basketball job at Iona. Being back in New York and a basketball junkie, Pitino has some opinions about what’s going on with the professional scene in New York.
For one, he was “shocked” the Nets and Kenny Atkinson parted ways, which he expressed to Steve Serby of the New York Post. Primarily because Pitino doesn’t think much of Brooklyn’s roster without Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving:
If you look at his roster right now, there’s no way they’re a playoff team, and he has them in the playoffs. He took guys with no reputation, and developed them into really good basketball players. Actually would have been one of my choices for Coach of the Year.
And while he thinks Durant could be an all-time great and he’s a fan of Irving, Pitino doesn’t seem fully convince the Nets will be championship contenders.
It all depends on how good they’re gonna be defensively. Are you gonna be Houston? Nothing wrong with that, if that’s the type you want to be, then that’s the type of team you will be. You’ve gotta develop an identity of what you want to be from a style standpoint, and once they develop that identity through their new coach, then we’ll see how good they’re going to be.
The Nets front office hardly got a chance to see what this team looks like with Jacque Vaughn in charge. Even then, the team will look different when Durant and Irving are both healthy, too.