Both are young coaches dealing with green, inexperienced rosters.
Yet the messages Brad Stevens and Jason Kidd are sending about those rosters stand in stark contrast.
After the Milwaukee Bucks’ 106-101 loss to Miami Heat on Wednesday night — their third defeat in four games — Kidd was asked how to prevent his team from playing “selfish” basketball.
His response, essentially, was to blame the Bucks’ shortcomings on their youth.
“I think when you become 25 (years old) or, you know, in the 28 range, you tend to think about the game,” Kidd said, via Deadspin. “We’re talking about kids that are thinking about trying to put the ball in the basket. And they all believe they can do it, and until we can think about being a team and making a play and being unselfish … When we’re selfish, we’re as bad as anybody in the league.
“And there’s no coaching, there’s nothing that you can do but go through it and learn. And we can keep telling them what’s coming, as a coach, and we can tell them what to do, but … it’s up to them to make that decision.”
Kidd has a right to be frustrated. Milwaukee has plenty of talent — led by MVP candidate Giannis Antetokounmpo, recent acquisition Eric Bledsoe and a lengthy, athletic supporting cast — but is one of the youngest teams in the NBA, with an average age of 26.1. It’s tough to coax quality basketball out of a team that boasts just two players (Bledsoe and Jason Terry) with more than five years of NBA experience.
But let’s contrast Kidd’s comments with what Stevens said back in October about his Celtics roster, which is even younger than the Bucks’ (average age: 25.1) and had just lost Gordon Hayward for the season.
“Let’s beat the age thing,” Stevens said at the time, via MassLive.com’s Jay King. “Let’s not talk about the age thing. Let’s talk about how we can be better at what we can control and how we can learn and grow every day and everybody expedite the learning curve.”
And here’s Stevens on 21-year-old Jaylen Brown and 20-year-old Jayson Tatum in October, via the Boston Herald:
“They are young guys. But to us, with the situation we’re in, they’re guys. Like, we need them to be guys.”
See the difference?
Of course, it helps when your young bucks (pun intended) are surrounded by a transcendent talent in Kyrie Irving and a stable veteran presence in Al Horford. Stevens clearly has more talent to work with than Kidd. He doesn’t have much more experience, though: Just three active Celtics (excluding Hayward) have been in the league for more than five years (Marcus Morris, Aron Baynes and Horford).
What we’re getting at is this: The message matters, and Stevens’ high expectations of his young players is at least part of the reason why Boston sits 10 1/2 games ahead of the seventh-place Bucks atop the Eastern Conference.
