Kenny Atkinson has done a great job in Brooklyn motivating scrappers and molding projects. But when the Nets added Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and DeAndre Jordan, some worried he won’t be able to coach stars.
Turns out those stars wanted to be coached by him.
“Kenny’s known for telling it like it is, which I appreciate,” said Irving, who was accompanied to the hospital by Atkinson following Tuesday’s facial fracture.
“You’ve got to go,” Atkinson shrugged. “It’s no great Mother Teresa moment, it’s just something you do.”
That straightforward style was cited by the star trio as a draw that lured them to Brooklyn, calling him honest and genuine.
“Kenny’s a very hard-nosed guy,” Jordan added of the Northport-bred Atkinson. “He’s from this area, so he’s tough. And he’s a super competitor. You want that kind of coach.”
Durant did his research the way a social media-loving millennial might: on YouTube. And he liked what he saw of Atkinson.
“I really liked his approach to his craft as a coach. That drew me in pretty quickly,” said Durant, adding, “I could just see it through YouTube and clips that he was pretty genuine about the game.”
That’s both part of Atkinson’s persona and his coaching upbringing under current Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer.“What I learned from him is to really challenge your best players, be direct with them, coach them harder than you coach anybody else on the team,” Atkinson said. “I do think it’s part of my personality. I don’t mind conflict and telling guys what I see.
“Personally I think that’s how guys want to be coached.”
They like hard and direct and honest. Sometimes maybe I could be a little more diplomatic, but I think they understand the emotions of that.”
And that means he won’t be walking on eggshells with Durant and Irving. They’d smell BS before the con even starts.
“You have to be yourself. You have to be authentic. If you’re not authentic they’ll see through that, then you’re in trouble,” Atkinson said.
“It’ll be interesting. We’ll see when the film sessions start coming. … We’ll go through some rough times with all the players. You go through two, three days without talking to a player because they’re mad, then you get over it, and then you become closer. That’s how relationships build. But I’m not afraid of that, the conflict.”
Going into his fourth season, Atkinson arrived with a reputation as a developmental coach, but had to develop his own skills handling endgame situations.
Now he’s grown far more comfortable in his own professional skin.
“Kenny started off as a development guy, and to see his rise to a head coach, I know how hard that is,” Durant told YES Network. “[To] get to the playoffs and just create an atmosphere here, I was really impressed and I wanted to be part of it.”
Atkinson did a great job developing Spencer Dinwiddie from the G-League and Joe Harris from the waiver wire, molding both into top-100 NBA players. But top-15 talent — and the egos that go with it — is a different deal, especially since those players command a certain level of leadership.
“That’ll be interesting to see,” Atkinson admitted. “But I do think the best teams, the players have ownership of the team. That’s what you want to evolve, to be the players having ownership and creating their own identity. Player-led teams, that’s the elite level.
“Of course you have to guide them and coach them, but when it’s player-led … last year when we had that player-led film session [shows why].”