As the Nets’ season careens off the rails, with another head coach out the door, general manager Sean Marks said Tuesday in Brooklyn “we’re in a results-driven business,” which is what led him to make the decision to fire Jacque Vaughn and replace him with interim head coach Kevin Ollie.
But even Marks acknowledged that the roster isn’t good enough, and he spoke about “accountability” and there have been very little positive results in Brooklyn for much of his tenure.
He pointed to “the level of compete” Marks wants to see from the group that was 15-15 just after Christmas but 6-18 since.
And then he pointed to his own shortcomings and why there are questions about his own job status.
“When you have to have moved on from a coach, you’ve got to reflect on that and say ‘What went wrong? What could I have done differently? What could we have done differently? Did we support him enough? Did we have the right roster?’ ” Marks said. “I absolutely take accountability for the roster.”
And that roster is partially why Vaughn is out of a job.
“We’re not going to be the most talented team in the league,” Marks said. “I’m not an idiot. I totally understand that. But at the same time, this is a talented group of young men out there and I think there’s plays and my expectations and I think their expectations should be to hold each other accountable to do the little things, the effort plays … the loose balls, the contested shots and so forth, diving on the floor. I mean, these are things that should be expected when you’re in a place that we’re at right now where we’re clawing and grappling for every single thing we can. That’s what I would hope to see over these next 28 games, and that’s probably to be quite frank, some things I haven’t seen, the level of effort and the level of compete has not always been there.”
Despite his admission of the flaws of the roster and the fact he’s already gone through three head coaches — Vaughn, Kenny Atkinson and Steve Nash — before promoting Ollie, Marks sounded confident in his place in the organization, even with questions about why he is the one leading the search for finding Vaughn’s permanent replacement.
He was hired by former owner Mikhail Prokhorev in 2016, and the Nets have advanced past the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs just once. Vaughn was fired less than a year after receiving a multiyear extension.
Marks said Tuesday that he and owner Joe Tsai “have always been in complete partnership. And it doesn’t mean we always agree.
You have to have good discussions and robust discussions, but Joe and I will make this decision and he has given me no reason to believe that I won’t be able to make that decision.”
But the GM acknowledged that the entire organization was responsible for where the team is, including Marks.
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“First and foremost we all need accountability for this,’’ Marks said. “I need to take accountability. The roster is my responsibility. I’m not shying away from that. When you have to make a decision like moving off a head coach, it’s not entirely [Vaughn’s] fault here. We can all look in the mirror and say what could we have done differently? What could we do better? I think we do need to get back to playing hard and competing.”
The turning point of the season occurred in a lopsided loss to Milwaukee on the second game of a back-to-back, when the Nets opted to rest most of their starters, a decision that resulted in the team getting fined and the season immediately going down the tubes.
“Firstly, I don’t think we lost the team that day,’’ Marks said. “I think there were comments made obviously, and I appreciate the fact that players want to play. They want to play night in and night out. Again, I don’t think there was one decision that ultimately affected one the record or one this decision to this day. I think a lot of things went into that.”
Still, there’s no denying how the season turned following that game and Marks looked back on how the team played under Vaughn last season, following the trades of Kevin Durant to Phoenix and Kyrie Irving to Dallas, when the Nets managed to make the playoffs.
On Tuesday, he criticized the effort level of theis year’s team.
When asked about the next low point of the season, a 50-point blowout to the Celtics that ended up being Vaughn’s final game, Marks said “it would be a little silly for me to say” that caused Vaughn’s dismissal.
“When you get to a juncture here and … we have not had the results that we wanted to have, you look at the grand scheme of things and the record the last couple of months, the direction of the team and where its potentially trending, this was an opportunity to make a change at this particular juncture,’’ Marks said.