With four days before their next game against the Atlanta Hawks on Sunday night, the Nets essentially are giving Johnson five days to rest his heel and get better.

“We’re just concerned with the four (games) in five (days) and a little bit of the mentality that we had going to the All-Star break,” Nets interim coach P.J. Carlesimo said. “You have four days (off), so you’re tempted to say we hold him out one more it’ll give him five days to get healthy.”

Johnson missed three games because of the sore left heel before returning for the team’s last six. During that span, he averaged 13 points on 47.1 percent shooting in 33.6 minutes.

He had 20 points in 37 minutes on 8-of-11 shooting in Monday night’s loss to the Philadelphia 76ers.

Johnson had hoped the injury wouldn’t linger on when he returned, but it has.

In 61 games, the 31-year-old veteran is averaging 16.6 points on 42.7 percent shooting.

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Mike Brown (Los Angeles) gone five games into the season; Avery Johnson (Brooklyn) gone the day after Christmas, 28 games into the season; Scott Skiles (Milwaukee) gone 32 games in, when his team fell to .500 for the fourth time this season. Gentry lasted 41 games.

And somehow, there have been no Phil Jackson (or Stan Van Gundy) sightings.

Since the firings, the Lakers, Nets and Bucks have gone three different directions. The Nets are 9-2 post-AJ, the Lakers are 16-18 since firing Brown, the Bucks 3-3 since Skiles was asked to return the keys. One coach is catching hell (Mike D’Antoni with the Lakers), one is so under-the-radar that hardly anyone knows he is a current head coach of an NBA team (Jim Boylan with the Bucks), one is on pace to have a statue built in his likeness outside the Barclays Center (P.J. Carlesimo with the Nets). With the Suns, it’s too early to tell.

Each team had different reasons for enforcing a head coaching change when it did. The results of each are so all over the place that it’s hard to determine if there is a right or wrong in what each team did, the way the teams went about doing it and/or the arguable timing of them all.

No rhyme, less reason. Nothing seems to fit when the immediate results are so random and varied. Owners flip a coin, hoping it’ll land on the opposite side of their current results.

Just two weeks ago, we watched the NFL fire seven coaches on Black Monday. The NBA? Owners don’t have patience like that. They embrace change in a different way. They react with quickness. Regardless of how the firings are rationalized internally or justified publicly, two things are certain: Job security for an NBA coach is maybe the greatest oxymoron in sports, and there is no assurance that the immediate results under a new leader will give any team the answer it sought.

For instance, there were four coaching changes during the 2011-12 shortened season. Of those four, three of the coaches were retained and have not been pink-slipped. Yet.

Yet, there’s no telling if Randy Wittman in Washington, Keith Smart in Sacramento or Mike Woodson in New York (although he seems relatively safe, nothing is guaranteed if the Knicks fall out of the top four seeding in the East or the “Amar’e Experiment” doesn’t work out soon) were the right choices. There’s no telling if there would be any difference if the teams did what Orlando did when it rode the season out with the existing/sacrificial coach, dismissed him in the offseason, hired the guy the owner and organization “really” wanted (Jacque Vaughn) and began the new season fresh.

The Bulls waited until the offseason to hire Tom Thibodeau a few years ago, as did the Clippers with Vinny Del Negro and Golden State with Mark Jackson. Indiana did not with Frank Vogel. And all these teams are remarkably better than they were the day the current coaches took over.

Go figure.

In the NFL, going back a few years, Marty Schottenheimer (his first job) and Don Coryell (his second) replaced fired head coaches in the middle of a season, and their careers turned out well. In comparison, Jason Garrett took over the Cowboys in November 2010 when Jerry Jones fired Wade Phillips after a 1-7 start. Now the odds are, even after two 8-8 full seasons as Jerry’s puppet, Garrett might not make it to Black Monday next year.

In the NHL, Ken Hitchcock took over a 6-7-0 team in St. Louis last season and proceeded to finish 49-22-11 and first in the Central. Bruce Boudreau was on both ends of an owner’s midseason whims: fired in D.C. with a 12-9-1 record only to be hired by Anaheim and go 27-23-8 with a team that finished last in the Pacific, even after improving under him.

In MLB. In the English Premier League. In the National Rugby League. In any team sport at the pro level, the same theory-less theory holds true. The results prove to be the same: inconclusive. Same no rhyme. Same less reason.

So how do we judge and or generalize when it is a good/bad, appropriate/inexcusable, smart/incompetent time to fire/hire head coaches?

The best example of how (and why) there may never be an answer to this, especially in the NBA where the coaching carousel can get extreme and thoughtless, can be found in the head coaching history of Gregg Popovich in San Antonio.

He, too, was an interim coach who replaced Bob Hill 18 games into the 1996-97 season. (His was one of eight midseason coaching changes by seven teams.) Since then, Popovich has gone on to become the sensei of all active coaches. And he would be the perfect example of the upside to firing a coach during or somewhere in the middle of an NBA season if … at the time he wasn’t the GM and VP of basketball operations for the Spurs and he hadn’t appointed himself as head coach.

Despite owners’ certainty that a change on the bench will bring different results, flipping a coin often lands with the same ugly results staring them in the face. Heads or tails. And sometimes, because they limit their thinking to those two options, either this or that, they’re surprised when it lands on the coin’s narrow third surface, spinning on its edge.

Coaches in all sports come and go. Coaches in the NBA just seem to do so at an advanced pace.

When it comes to the revolving door at the core of most relationships between ownership and a head coach, how the coin will land after it stops spinning is too hard to guess. A few games midseason rarely determine — especially in the NBA — the good decision/bad decision outcome of a bad fire/new hire.

Or is it new fire/bad hire? Looking at the immediate results, I can’t tell if there’s even any difference.

The post Midseason NBA coaching changes appeared first on IdealCapper.

The Nets squandered a 23-point lead and allowed Oklahoma City to tie it at 85 before ripping off a 23-8 run to seize control. Durant was ejected near the end of the surge, arguing with Danny Crawford after the referee already had issued a technical foul against Kendrick Perkins.

Durant scored 27 points and Russell Westbrook had 26 points and 10 assists for Oklahoma City, which lost for only the third time at home this season.

Durant, the three-time scoring champion, never had before been ejected in his six NBA seasons but got tossed after Brooklyn rallied largely from the foul line. The Nets made 11 free throws in a span of just more than 5 minutes, pulling away after Oklahoma City finally had fought all the way back.

Brook Lopez added 25 points as Brooklyn ended a seven-game losing streak in the series and got a win for interim coach P.J. Carlesimo against the team that fired him back in 2008.

The Thunder clamped down after trailing by 16 at halftime, rallying to pull within 71-68 when Westbrook finished off a 12-3 burst with a jumper from the left elbow with 3:47 left in the third quarter. Lopez powered his way in for a two-handed slam to stem the tide for Brooklyn, but Oklahoma City kept coming.

Durant and Kevin Martin connected on consecutive 3-pointers to finally even it up at 85 with 7:11 to play, only for Johnson to answer with a runner at the other end to put the Nets right back ahead and start the clinching run.

The Nets managed to get Carlesimo a rare win in Oklahoma City — something that proved difficult during his brief stretch on the Thunder sidelines.

Carlesimo was the coach when Oklahoma City got its franchise, leading the SuperSonics for their final season in Seattle and then going 1-12 in charge of the Thunder. He was fired and replaced — then on an interim basis — by Scott Brooks, who has overseen the team’s rise into a championship contender.

Back when Carlesimo was in charge, Durant was starting his second year in the NBA and Westbrook was a rookie who had yet to break into the starting lineup. Now, they’re both established All-Stars.

“For it to come together as quickly as it has, I think people believed that this was going to be a good team, with the nucleus they had and even starting out, the pieces,” Carlesimo said beforehand. “Russell, of course, was a huge addition the first year here and ever since then, there’s been good moves and they’ve tweaked it.”

Carlesimo also singled out the additions of Thabo Sefolosha and Perkins — both after he was fired — as key steps in the franchise’s rise.

“It’s a team I feel closer to than a lot of other teams. Hopefully, we helped KD and Nick (Collison) a little bit and Russell a tiny bit that first year, but I think it’s safe to say they’ve gone on and overcome whatever coaching they got from me,” Carlesimo said, drawing laughs.

At the start, it looked like Carlesimo’s new squad would run away with it against the Thunder, who started the day with the league’s best record.

Johnson and Lopez combined to go 9 for 9 from the field to propel the Nets to a quick 27-11 lead, and Brooklyn tried to keep the hammer down by re-inserting Williams after they had committed three turnovers in a span of five possessions without him to start the second quarter.

Upon returning, Williams immediately set up Keith Bogans for a 3-pointer, then used a behind-the-back, bounce pass for an assist on Kris Humphries’ jumper before nailing a 3-pointer of his own to push the lead out to 45-24. Brooklyn led by as much as 23 twice — including at 55-32 after Johnson drilled a 3-pointer off a touch pass from Gerald Wallace — before Westbrook and Serge Ibaka teamed up to score nine straight points to breathe some life into Oklahoma City.

Game notes
Carlesimo’s only win with the Thunder — after the SuperSonics had relocated from Seattle — came at home on Nov. 2, 2008, against Minnesota. … The Thunder’s largest previous deficit of the season was 16 in a loss at home against Memphis. … Oklahoma City got a delay of game warning for failing to get onto the court in time for tip-off, as part of the NBA’s emphasis on allowing teams 90 seconds between the end of introductions and the tip-off. … Nets reserve Jerry Stackhouse sat out with a sore right hamstring.

The post Kevin Durant ejected as streaking Thunder fall to Nets appeared first on IdealCapper.

King told Ian O’Connor during an interview on ESPN New York 98.7 FM on Sunday morning that the team “supports” interim coach P.J. Carlesimo and will “re-evaluate” things moving forward, while deflecting questions about Jackson by repeatedly saying “P.J.’s our coach.”

“We’ve put our support behind (P.J.) and then we’ll look at things and evaluate it later,” King said. “I know people have been throwing lists together and things like that, but we have not contacted anybody. … We’ve made the move and now we’re going to let P.J. coach.”

While King didn’t want to put a timetable on anything, he did suggest that Carlesimo could conceivably finish out the season, calling it “a great opportunity” for Johnson’s former assistant, who has several years of NBA head coaching experience under his belt with three other franchises.

Sources had told ESPN.com that the Nets have made Jackson, an 11-time NBA coaching champion, their top target to replace Johnson on a permanent basis. But when King was asked about when he was going to contact Jackson, he replied, “I don’t know how many times I can say it or Mikhail can say it. P.J.’s our coach. We’re gonna let him coach and then re-evaluate things. I know Mikhail said it about 10 times when he was asked, and I’ve been saying it, and I think people just keep dismissing what we say.”

Prokhorov spent $330 million to improve the Nets’ roster in the offseason and said a successful first season in Brooklyn would be defined by a trip to the Eastern Conference finals. Given those high expectations — the Nets are in the third-year of Prokhorov’s five-year championship plan — it seems reasonable the Nets would contact the biggest names on the market.

Carlesimo, who is 2-0 since taking over for Johnson with wins over the Charlotte Bobcats and Cleveland Cavaliers, said Saturday he believes the possibility of retaining the job for the rest of the season is “available” to him. Carlesimo had a fancy lunch meeting in New York City with Prokhorov Saturday, but declined to discuss specifics of what was said about his future.

“Sometimes you just need a different voice,” King said. “What I like about P.J. is he’s had NBA head coaching experience. I think he understands the game, he’s been around it.”

King believes this is a good time to give Carlesimo an opportunity to lead the team.

“More than anything, you just need to calm the waters and let guys breathe as a group and try to gel,” King said. “Because if we’re in the middle of a search, the turmoil just continues. We need our guys to just focus on the now and San Antonio (on Monday).”

Van Gundy is held in high regard by the Nets, but a league source said he needs to learn more about the organization before determining his level of interest in the job. He also would prefer taking over after the season, not during it, the source said.

“I would never comment on a job that was filled,” Van Gundy told Yahoo! Sports, which first reported his preference to wait until after the season. “I was an interim coach. I hope P.J. has great success there. He’s someone I respect greatly.”

Kelvin Sampson, Nate McMillan and Mike Dunleavy have been other names mentioned to take over for the Nets.

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