Dom Amore: UConn’s Kevin Ollie has earned this chance to turn Nets around

From the highest of highs, and through some very dark places, Kevin Ollie kept his basketball career alive. When he joined the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets as an assistant coach before season, there was light getting through the ceiling again, a path was opening.

“Talking to Kevin at the beginning of the season, I hadn’t heard him as lively, as free, almost as if burden had been lifted, like, ‘man, this is where I’m supposed to be,’” said Donny Marshall, Ollie’s former teammate at UConn and long-time NBA analyst.

Ollie, 10 years after leading UConn to the national championship, six years after he and his alma mater parted acrimoniously, a rift that still hasn’t healed, has finally gotten another chance to be a head coach, the NBA opportunity for which he once seemed so destined. The Nets fired Jacque Vaughn and elevated Ollie, 51, presumably for the rest of the season, beginning with Brooklyn’s game at Toronto on Thursday night.

Report: Former UConn coach Kevin Ollie taking over Nets after firing of Jacque Vaughn

It’s an audition for the Nets’ job, or any other head coaching spot that might open up in the NBA.

“So talking to him (Sunday), it was pretty cool,” Marshall said. “Yes, he knows he’s got a lot of work to do. It’s not his job, but I reminded him, ‘you’ve been interim before — in a really tough spot.”

Marshall was referring to Ollie’s first few months at the helm at UConn, where he replaced retiring Hall of Famer Jim Calhoun in September 2012. AD Warde Manuel gave Ollie a contract only for the 2012-13 season, seven months, but after getting the Huskies off to a solid start, Ollie earned his multi-year deal by December.

And that wasn’t his first audition. Much of Ollie’s 13-year NBA career was played on short-term, often 10-day contracts, for 11 different teams.

“Kevin, the way he played, is cut out to be a great NBA coach,” Marshall said. “The great, great players, we know, struggled as head coaches, the megastars. Because Kevin’s an overachiever, they find a way to build culture.”

Now, Ollie has 28 games to show he can change the tenor of the Nets (21-33), who lost to the Celtics by 50 before firing Vaughn, for the better. His win-loss record will probably matter less, in this one instance, than showing ownership he can command the respect of the team.

And, really, this may be the type of job for which Ollie was best suited all along.

“The basketball stuff is easy for Kevin,” Marshall said. “The hard part is getting in. …. We know he loves to read, and he loves terminology, ‘ten toes in,’ and things like that. But there is not a lot of coach-speak with the players. He’s real with them.”

To say that Ollie “deserves a second chance” sounds almost ludicrous. Of course, he does, given the things many other coaches have done and got chances to coach again and again. Yes, things went sour at UConn after the championship, and after two consecutive losing seasons, it was reasonable to expect a change in March 2018. UConn tried to save the $11 million they owed on Ollie’s contract by firing him for “just cause,” citing relatively minor NCAA infractions. The litigation got nasty, which litigation often does, before an arbitrator ruled in Ollie’s favor and he got all the money.

“He’s one of my guys and there’s no ill will,” said Calhoun, who pushed hard for Ollie to be his successor, then was pulled into the dispute. “Kevin Ollie was as hard a working player as I ever had. He played four great years for me, had a great NBA career, came back as an assistant. I recommended him to become the head coach and he won the national championship, which was great. It’s unfortunate what happened between he and the university, but I wish him the best of luck with the Nets.”

Life’s timing, redemption, and the power of Kevin Ollie’s voice

After returning to UConn as an assistant coach in 2010, Ollie helped the Huskies win their third national championship, drawing effective pro-style sets and high-energy motivation skills. As head coach, his X’s and O’s impressed NBA executives and he was mentioned as a candidate for several openings. He was, after making that out-of-the-blue prediction of a national championship on March 5, 2014, and making it happen as a No. 7 seed, as hot as any coaching commodity in the country.

His later UConn teams, players he recruited, were not nearly as adept at executing his plans. Maybe the college game, the recruiting trail and dealing with players in that age bracket, just wasn’t as good a fit for Ollie as it seemed early on.

The NCAA, ruling that Ollie provided misleading information to its investigators, issued a three-year “show-cause” order, which would have made it almost impossible for him to get another college job during that span. Instead, Ollie went to run Overtime Elite, a new program designed for pro prospects who did not want to play college basketball. He helped develop lottery picks Amen and Ausar Thompson before leaving there.

Still there was some surprise when Ollie, so long after his named had cooled, emerged as a leading candidate for the open head coaching job with the Pistons last off-season. Given Detroit’s historically bad season, it was probably a good thing for Ollie to finish second. But it showed his name was back on NBA radar, more than 10 years after he retired as a respected locker room leader, a mentor to players like Kevin Durant and LeBron James, a teammate of Allen Iverson, a player that coaches like Larry Brown wanted to have around.

“Everything that has gone into Kevin’s name and the respect that he has around basketball, that is not only the reason Jacque Vaughn hired him, it’s why the Nets management decided to go with him,” Marshall said. “Look, everyone gets fired. Some are uglier than others, some are more amicable, but that doesn’t matter any more. That happened 100 years ago. But what he’s accomplished, winning and the relationships are probably most important, the relationships with the league and players and the respect that he has. That’s what gets him into this position.”

The NBA has gotten younger, though the players are still grown men. It has been widely reported that Ollie immediately got the attention and earned the trust of the youngish Nets roster during his time as an assistant. Now Ollie has 28 games to show he can keep that trust as a head coach, and establish a winning culture and start taking Brooklyn’s heart, at least, back from the Knicks.

“Pretty much everything Kevin has written down for himself has happened,” Marshall said. “‘We’re going to win a national title.’ We all laughed when he said that, especially the way he did it. ‘C’mon Kev, you couldn’t even see that coming with that team.’ Then he was going to be part of this new organization and he said ‘this is going to be great and we’re going to have some draft picks.’ Sure enough. Then he was going to get back in the NBA, and here we go. … Culture is still something very important in the NBA for organizations. The culture part of it is what Kevin is going to be able to build, and what the owners are going to be looking at.”