Jacque Vaughn has been Nets' steadying influence and motivator
Nets head coach Jacque Vaughn reacts in the first half against the Knicks at Barclays Center on Wednesday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
LOS ANGELES — Jacque Vaughn never thought he would be a basketball coach when he was growing up in nearby Pasadena.
Vaughn’s dreams, in some ways, were a lot bigger when he headed off to Kansas. A poetry-writing business major with a 4.0 average, he famously left reporters in Lawrence, Kansas, with their mouths agape when he quoted Robert Frost in a news conference.
Rocky Moore, Vaughn’s high school coach, compares Vaughn to five-time NBA-title-winning coach Steve Kerr, whom he also coached. “I thought they’d become CEOs of a Fortune 500 company,” Moore told The Orange County Register.
Vaughn, like Kerr, ended up playing for Gregg Popovich near the end of his career. It was then that he caught the coaching bug.
“I think it equated to the fact I was able to talk to the No. 1 guy on the team and also have a relationship with the No. 15 guy on the team,” said Vaughn, who had “interim’’ removed from his title and became the Nets’ head coach last week. “I am able to understand and have empathy for the position people are in. And I think that matters a lot in sports.”
Vaughn’s ability to relate to his players may be what the Nets need as they try to recover from their recent dramas, which include losing in the first round of the playoffs last season, weathering Kevin Durant’s trade demands, dealing with a poor start to this season and Steve Nash’s firing, and surviving the drama of Kyrie Irving’s ongoing suspension for linking to an antisemitic movie on his Twitter and Instagram accounts.
Vaughn has been a steadying force. The Nets were 4-2 under him heading into Sunday night’s game against the Lakers. Five of those games have come without Irving, who was slated to miss his sixth straight game.
“All the guys have responded to how [Vaughn] wants us to play,” Durant said. “He started simplifying the offense, defense, just making [it] easy for all of us and putting us all in situations to succeed individually, which is going to help us as a collective.”
One of Vaughn’s more interesting moves is bringing Ben Simmons off the bench. Simmons had one of his better games in Saturday’s win over the Clippers and was instrumental in getting Seth Curry going early with the pick-and-roll.
“It’s been great from day one [that] he got the interim job,” Curry said. “I didn’t know what would happen, but he came in and was honest with us and just saying, ‘I’m going to work hard every day. Every day they ask me to be the interim head coach, I’m going to come in, I’m going to coach you guys as good as I can.’ That kind of mindset riled the team. That’s kind of the mindset we took on every day.”
This Nets team is far different from the one Vaughn led in his only other head-coaching stint. He spent two-plus seasons as the head coach in Orlando, where he went 58-158 with a not- very-talented Magic team.
Vaughn has spent the last seven years as an assistant with the Nets, first under Kenny Atkinson and then Nash. In March 2020, Vaughn led the Nets to a 5-3 record as an interim coach in the bubble after Atkinson was fired.
Vaughn was only 37 years old when he got the Orlando job, and the thought around the league is he is deserving of this second chance.
“A guy like Jacque . . . he’s been waiting for a while,” said Clippers coach Tyronn Lue, who played college basketball against Vaughn. “He’s well deserving and I think he’s ready.”
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
