Ousting Kidd would be ultimate payoff for Scott

by Ian O'Connor

Updated: April 23, 2008, 1:35 PM EST 234 comments

Coaches are supposed to do a lot of things after their teams choke, but sleeping in and rewarding their players with a paid holiday are not among them.

With the Celtics holding a 2-1 series lead, I thought Scott was hopelessly overmatched. I figured this would be the day that ultimately cost him his job, a notion hardened by the confession of one of his stars, Kenyon Martin, who was already talking in the past tense.

"It feels like we lost the series," Martin said.

Somehow, some way, his wasn't a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Nets won Game 4, Game 5 and Game 6.

Scott declared himself as a head coach right then and there. He didn't care that he'd be ridiculed for giving his players a mental health break in the wake of the Game 3 disaster, and for publicly admitting he repeatedly hit the snooze button rather than rise before dawn and watch that horror film of a tape.

Scott felt the pulse of his devastated team. He thought it needed love, not war, and his choice landed a practical joke of a franchise in the middle of its first NBA Finals.

Another good deed that couldn't go unpunished: Scott returned the Nets to the Finals the following season, lost to Tim Duncan a year after losing to Shaquille O'Neal, then didn't even make it to the next All-Star break before he was effectively fired by the future Hall of Famer Jason Kidd, whose championship aims are now being crushed by Scott's second team.

The New Orleans Hornets hold a 2-0 lead over the Dallas Mavericks because Scott's young point guard, Chris Paul, is embarrassing Scott's old point guard, Kidd, who had ordered Nets president Rod Thorn to dump his coach in a different life.

Scott isn't about to comment for the record on the delicious irony involved. He's not going to play that game — not until this first-round series is over, anyway.

But he wouldn't be human if he wasn't savoring the prospect of eliminating Kidd after Kidd eliminated the Nets by turning on the same executive, Thorn, he convinced to turn on Scott.

New Jersey missed the playoffs with a 34-48 record after six consecutive trips because Kidd put his own agenda a country mile ahead of his team's. He wanted to play with Kobe Bryant last year, then decided he would stand a better chance with Dirk Nowitzki this year. It looks like the worst kind of bet. Not only is Kidd facing an early exit, but Scott is the one bum-rushing him out the door.

Turns out New Orleans is a far more legitimate contender than the Mavs, who have been overwhelmed by the Hornets' energy and athleticism. Under Scott, Paul has developed into an MVP candidate, David West has developed into an All-Star and Tyson Chandler has developed into the frontcourt force Chicago once hired him to be.

For this, Scott should be named NBA Coach of the Year, no questions asked. It's a just reward for a man who was fired while in first place in New Jersey — as the most successful coach the Nets ever had.

Scott has shepherded the Hornets through Hurricane Katrina, through the back and forth between Oklahoma City and New Orleans. He has established a program that gets better with time, winning 18 games in his first year, then 38, then 39, then 56. He has proven himself capable of seizing a division title while living in the same division with the mighty Spurs.

Scott has managed all of the above while embracing the same Joe Cool look and demeanor that defined his coach with the Showtime Lakers, Pat Riley.

"I'm always thinking about all the things Riles did and the speeches he gave," Scott once said, "because I've never had a coach like him."

Confidence has never been a page missing from his playbook. When Scott was an Arizona State prospect asked to compare himself to an NBA player before the '83 draft, he said, "Magic Johnson, except I'm quicker and can shoot better from the outside."

Johnson and the other veteran Lakers barely spoke to him at the start, angry that their popular teammate, Norm Nixon, was traded for Scott's services.

"Guys were just trying to toughen him up and put pressure on him so he'd never be rattled by anything he saw in the playoffs," Riley once told me. "And when we won back-to-back championships, Byron was the one who really rose to the occasion."

Scott has spent nearly his entire basketball life in the playoffs, so he knows the drill.

"It's like riding a bike," he said.

He rides it better than most. To defeat the Celtics in 2002, Scott put in new pick-and-roll plays for Kidd and Keith Van Horn the morning of Game 4 and watched them work the way the Lakers' new plays worked against Boston following the Memorial Day Massacre 17 years earlier.

In his first series of '02, his first as a playoff coach, Scott answered a Reggie Miller dagger — a long 3 at the Game 5 buzzer to force overtime — by calmly walking into the huddle and telling his frazzled Nets, "Don't worry. It will just take us an extra five minutes to advance."

Scott could've won the whole thing the following year if K-Mart didn't come up smaller than a referee's whistle against the Spurs. He could've stayed "on a path to a dynasty," in Riley's words, if Kidd didn't harden his reputation as a coach-killer extraordinaire.

But Kidd got his way and installed his man, Lawrence Frank, who hadn't made it out of the second round before he finished 14 games under .500 this year.

Frank and Eddie Jordan were the Nets assistants said to do much of the heavy lifting, with Scott merely in charge of dressing the part. Only now, Frank and Jordan are hurting in the lightweight East while Scott is living large in the wild, wild West.

He has the Hornets playing defense and making life miserable for one of the great playmakers of all time. If Kidd offers to shake his hand at the close of this series, Byron Scott should do what Kidd used to do best:

Pass.