Jason Kidd faces one last NBA mountain as Mavs in Finals originally appeared in NBC Sports Bay Area
Having experienced the good and ugly of sports and life, the most popular high school athlete in Bay Area sports history now wears his graying facial hair as a badge of maturity earned through years of work, turbulence and achievement. .
Jason Kidd, 51, has one more mountain to climb, one more professional summit to scale. And he’s looking at it.
In his third stop, 678 games into his professional head coaching career, Kidd is facing the NBA Finals. His Dallas Mavericks will face the mighty Boston Celtics, with Game 1 set for 6pm on Thursday at TD Garden.
“This is a journey towards a job,” Kidd said Wednesday during the finals press conference in Boston. “We have an opportunity here to find a way to win on the road. That’s how we’re approaching it.
“This is the best of the best at the highest level. It’s fun. That’s what the Finals are all about, it’s seeing which team is going to step up and take advantage of mistakes.”
It wasn’t long ago that Kidd, despite an offense anchored by stars Luka Dončić and Kyrie Irving, wondered if the Mavericks would be able to clinch a playoff spot in the tough Western Conference.
“Our offense is good enough,” Kidd told NBC Sports Bay Area in December when the Mavericks were in the Bay Area to face the Warriors. “I’ll take Luka and Kai anytime.
“But we have a lot of work to do to fix our defense. We have a newbie [Dereck Lively II] We like it a lot, but we need more on the rim and on the sides.”
So I asked Kidd if he misses Dorian Finney-Smith, a defensive wing who was traded to Brooklyn 11 months earlier.
“Yes,” Kidd said. “But that’s what it took to get Kyrie. I think it’s worth it.”
The Mavericks were ranked 22nd in defensive rating at the time, fifth in the Western Conference with an 18–14 record. Five weeks later, they were ranked 24th in defense with a 26-23 record. They dropped to eighth place.
The Dallas front office, led by general manager Nico Harrison — whose relationship with Kidd goes back more than 20 years — got to work, approaching the Feb. 8 NBA trade deadline for defensive buyouts. They came back with gifts, trading for Washington Wizards center Daniel Gafford and Charlotte Hornets forward PJ Washington.
The Mavericks have won 24 of their last 33 games, with the seventh-best defensive rating in the NBA (110.3) over that span. Only the Celtics, at 27-6, performed better.
Finishing fifth in the West, Dallas in the first round of the playoffs dispatched the fourth-seeded Los Angeles Clippers in six games before defeating the No. 1 Oklahoma City Thunder in six in the conference semifinals. Underdogs once again against the third-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves, the Mavericks shocked most observers by winning the conference finals in five games.
If there was an award for “Coach of the Playoffs,” Kidd would win it in a walk.
The Mavericks are in the Finals because Harrison beat the trade deadline by acquiring two starters, Gafford and Washington, who addressed a weakness and elevated the squad to contender status.
They’re in Boston because Kidd and his team, with top assistant Sean Sweeney as co-pilot, found the elusive key that unlocked Derrick Jones Jr., a superb athlete who spent six years searching for an effective offensive game. A 31 percent shooter from deep before this season, he’s shooting 39.6 percent in the playoffs.
Dallas rolled through the West because Kidd, a 19-year-old point guard, which was consecrated at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018, invented schemes that maximize Dončić and Irving, whose coexistence was questioned by many. Both are equally dynamic as a goalscorer or playmaker, while also possessing the killer instinct needed to win close games. Minnesota, which had the best defense in the league, was put to sleep by Dončić and Irving.
Mostly, though, the Mavericks made it to the Finals because Kidd bottled the prodigious sum of his experiences and carefully drank from it.
There was the storied prep career at St. Joseph High School (Alameda, Calif.) to back-to-back state championships. There were two seasons at Cal where his appeal led the Golden Bears to move several games to the Oakland Coliseum, which had nearly three times the capacity of Haas Pavilion in Berkeley. This led to Kidd entering the NBA and being taken second overall by the Mavericks. Playing for four different teams, Kidd’s professional resume includes 10 All-Star games, nine All-Defensive teams, seven All-NBA honors, five gold medals for Team USA and an unmatched 46-0 record in international play. .
All of this was accomplished despite a stormy first marriage that ended shortly after he pleaded guilty to domestic violence and later to a misdemeanor DWI charge.
Kidd is better for the trials and tribulations along the way. Through dramatic ups and downs, on and off the court, he is a survivor. It is visible in his gray face. He seems to know this too, which explains his composure in front of fire and his gift as a “star charmer”.
This is Dallas’ third trip to the Finals in 44 seasons. The last appearance was in 2011, when two Hall of Famers – Dirk Nowitzki and Kidd – led the team to its only NBA championship with a victory over the Miami Heat.
And on Thursday, he becomes the first coach to represent Oakland in the NBA Finals since Bill Russell in 1969 — four years before Jason was born to Steve and Anne Kidd.
All these decades later, Kidd is searching for the one significant thing he didn’t get in basketball. A ring as coach of the last team standing.
