Brooklyn Nets head coach Jacque Vaughn did a good coaching job this season in light of the circumstances in which he took over this Brooklyn team. Vaughn entered this season as the assistant coach to Steve Nash, but Nash was fired on Nov. 1 after a 2-5 start to the campaign. It seems that Nash was fired so abruptly because of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving each wanting out in the offseason for various reasons, usually relating to wanting Nash gone.
When Nash was fired, Vaughn was appointed the interim head coach for the second time in his time with the Nets. The first time Vaughn took over as the interim head coach was when Kenny Atkinson was fired in March of 2020. However, unlike the first time where Brooklyn chose someone instead of Vaughn to be the next head coach (Nash), the Nets decided to stick with Vaughn and even signed him to a contract extension in February.
Vaughn finished the season with a 43-32 record (57.3% winning percentage) and that was with having a completely different team after the trades of Durant and Irving. Since Vaughn had his full team post-trade deadline, the Nets went 12-15 as they scratched and clawed their way to the sixth seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs. That kind of coaching performance earned him the seventh-most points in the Coach of The Year award voting tied with Tom Thibodeau of the New York Knicks. With how crazy this season was for Brooklyn, Vaughn had one last message for everyone:
“Gives me a last chance to say thank you to the group. Not only the players, but everyone that supports us throughout the course of the year. So for me, that was the first bit of it is saying thank you to all those who participated in some form or fashion and to encourage the group that, how we were able to stay together, find ways to get it done, really limit our use of excuses. But, to encourage what the focus and energy and production was like introspectively, for everyone to look at it. And, then the last piece was to challenge the group also. Getting a chance to define our culture, have a clarity of our culture going forward, and challenge themselves to make themselves better when they come back.”
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