NBA 75: At No. 36, Jason Kidd used his vision and creativity to become an elite point guard
Mia Lopez (Editor’s note: Welcome back to The Athletic NBA 75. We’re re-running our top 40 players to count down every day from Sept. 8-Oct. 17, the day before the opening of the 2022-23 NBA season. This piece was first published on Dec. 24, 2021.)
There was a game in the Dallas Mavericks championship season, a road contest that was just one of 82, in which Jason Terry understood that Jason Kidd was “a different animal.”
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Terry had just hit a 3-pointer before the half, and Kidd saw something that could be exploited. At the break, Kidd said they should run the play four more times, consecutively, to start the half. The ball wouldn’t always end up in Terry’s hands as it did that one time, but it was going to dismantle the defense.
“I’m looking at him crazily like, ‘Come on, Jay, that’s not gonna work. They know what we’re doing. If I come off (a screen) the first time, they know what we’re doing. It’s not gonna work,’” Terry recalled. “In my head, that’s what I’m thinking. But another part of me is thinking, ‘He did just tell me to run down there in the corner, and if I do that four times in a row, I might not get it all four times, but the fourth time, I’ll get it, and I’ll hit a 3. I had just done that before the half.’ So I think, ‘You know what, let me just do what he’s asking me to do.’
“We ran the play four times in a row, scored four times, they called timeout. We get back to the huddle, and he’s just laughing. He never said anything, but the smile on his face, it was like, ‘Look man: I’ve been here before.’ It was just so impressive.”
Kidd’s computer-like processing of the game, which can be seen in players like LeBron James and Chris Paul, is a big part of why he comes in at No. 36 on The Athletic’s list of the top 75 players in the NBA. His accomplishments are undeniable: He was the co-Rookie of the Year in 1995, along with Grant Hill. He is a Hall of Famer. He is second, behind only John Stockton, in career assists. Stockton, Kidd, Bob Cousy, Oscar Robertson and Steve Nash are the only players to win at least five assist titles.
Kidd is fourth in triple-doubles and, despite his entering the league as not much of a shooting threat, 12th in 3-pointers made. The development of that last skill — he hit 43 deep balls in the Mavericks’ championship run in 2011 — was a huge part of why he was an essential part of a title team at age 37, by which point many of his physical skills had taken a hit. After hitting better than 36 percent of his 3-pointers in just two of his first 10 seasons, he topped 38 percent in each of his age 34, 35 and 36 seasons. He played more than 35 minutes per game in that championship run.
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“As his career went on, you had to really be concerned with his 3-point shooting,” said Dwane Casey, an assistant coach when Kidd was with the Mavericks, and a coach with the Timberwolves and Raptors as opposition. “Earlier in his career, you didn’t really have to prepare for his 3-point shooting. But he just made himself into a great 3-point shooter. It was kind of an evolving preparation for him. Earlier in his career he was so athletic, pushed the ball in transition. But later in his career, he really, really became a great 3-point shooter.”
He also is defined by his abhorrent behavior. In January 2001, he pleaded guilty to spousal abuse for hitting his then-wife, Joumana. The following offseason, Phoenix traded him to New Jersey. Late in his playing career, he also was arrested for driving while intoxicated after driving his car into a utility pole, ultimately pleading guilty.
Not that this is comparable to those offenses, but he also had early-career conflicts with teammates in Dallas and poor relationships with coaches at many stops in his career. It is believed that Kidd had a strong hand in getting Byron Scott fired in 2003-04, just a year after the Nets had made back-to-back runs to the NBA Finals. “He was kind of known as being an asshole,” Scott would say of Kidd later. (Lawrence Frank replaced Scott. In his first coaching job, with the Nets, Kidd infamously brought in Frank to be his top assistant, infamously reassigning him to do “daily assignments” after it became clear the two could not work together.)
Despite forming a talented trio with Jim Jackson and Jamal Mashburn during Kidd’s first stop in Dallas, he could not find a way to get along with Jackson, with the Mavericks trading Kidd in just his third season, one year after he was an All-Star in just his second season. His ability to forge and maintain healthy relationships has continued to be questioned during his coaching career, most recently with the overbearing tactics chronicled in Mirin Fader’s biography of Giannis Antetokounmpo, “Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an MVP.” None of that can, or should, be overlooked.
But Kidd was a genius-level basketball player.
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“The best example (of Kidd’s basketball mind) is him telling me, ‘When you run the floor and I throw you the ball, just catch it and take two steps and go up. And know that when you catch the ball, you’re gonna take two steps and go up,’” said Brian Scalabrine, Kidd’s teammate for four years in New Jersey. “‘You don’t have to see if there’s a guy in front of you. You just have to catch it and go up.’ I don’t have to catch, read the defense, see where my angle is at, then make a move. He did all that stuff for me. I equate it to a quarterback who throws the ball low over the middle so his receiver doesn’t get creamed by the middle linebacker. He’s making the decision for you.”
“He was normally right in his assessment of the situation — whether you wanted to trap or you wanted to go zone,” added Casey, the defacto defensive coordinator under Rick Carlisle in Dallas from 2008 through the championship season.
“I would say, ‘Go zone,’ and he would say, ‘Not yet, not yet.’ He was usually right. I would lean on him, get his feel (for the situation). And then all at once, he’d be like, ‘Let’s trap the post.’ It was always a give and take. … He was a riverboat gambler when he was a player. But nine times out of 10, he was right with what he was thinking.”
Kidd very much had two phases of his career: as a driver of transition offense and a passing deity in the first half of his career, and as a half-court orchestrator using the combination of his brains and his sturdy 6-foot-4 frame in the second half.
The younger and mid-career version was nothing shy of one of the biggest difference-makers in the NBA. Upon Kidd’s trade to New Jersey, the Nets doubled their win total, going from 26 to 52 wins. It was the type of transformation that would help Kidd’s closest peer from his era, Nash, win consecutive MVP awards a few years later as the Suns went from 29 wins the year before Nash joined them to a 62-win team after he went to Phoenix. As it was, Kidd finished second in the 2002 MVP voting, getting 45 first-place votes to Tim Duncan’s 57.
Kidd led the Nets to two consecutive Finals appearances, losing to the Lakers in 2002 and Spurs in 2003. Those Nets teams featured just two other former or future All-Stars: Kenyon Martin, who made it in 2004 (and left for Denver after the season), and Dikembe Mutombo, who played all of 34 games, regular season and playoffs, as a 36-year-old in 2002-03. With all due respect to solid-to-good starters like Richard Jefferson and Kerry Kittles, these teams were not overflowing with talent.
Kidd’s physicality enabled him to impact the game in ways his size wouldn’t necessarily allow in the case of many other players. Of all players who logged at least 500 games and were Kidd’s height or shorter, only three — Paul Arizin, Russell Westbrook and Cliff Hagan — averaged more than Kidd’s 6.3 rebounds per game. That’s also what allowed Kidd to rank so highly between Robertson and Westbrook, obliterating our ability to properly value the triple-double, when only Magic Johnson had more than Kidd.
Triple-doubles between 1974-2008
| Player | Triple Doubles |
|---|---|
Magic Johnson | 138 |
Jason Kidd | 103 |
Larry Bird | 59 |
Fat Lever | 42 |
Grant Hill | 29 |
Michael Jordan | 28 |
LeBron James | 24 |
Clyde Drexler | 23 |
Michael Ray Richardson | 21 |
Chris Webber | 21 |
That physicality served him in other ways, too. He was one of the best point guards ever when operating from the post, as well as a nine-time member of NBA All-Defense teams. Terry remembered a Mavericks game against the Lakers in which Shawn Marion was supposed to be the player guarding Kobe Bryant.
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“J-Kidd was like, ‘No, no, no, no. I got Kobe,’” Terry recalled. “‘That’s not a good matchup for us. No, I got Kobe. I was just on the Olympic team with Kobe. I watched him work out every day. I know his every move. He might still beat me and get his shot off, but it’s gonna be one of the toughest games Kobe’s ever played.’ I was like, ‘OK, if you need the help, I’ll be there. We got you.’
“That was the toughest 30 points I’ve ever seen Kobe Bryant get. And I’ve never seen someone block Kobe’s shot. J-Kidd, on one possession, Kobe goes to his patented fadeaway, comes behind, blocks his shot. I was so impressed. It took everything in me not to just go hug that dude. That’s Kobe Bryant, our Michael Jordan.
“From that day forward, anything he said, I did. I started following him.”
For Terry, that meant changing his routine and, for the first time, lifting weights on the morning of game days. Kidd explained to Terry that it was important to fatigue his legs in that situation, so he would be able to battle through the same circumstances in games. It worked — Kidd played in the NBA until he was 39, and Terry made it to 40.
For Casey, it meant letting go of the reins a little more and trusting the basketball savants in his locker room. That would come in handy in navigating his often-tumultuous relationship with Kyle Lowry in Toronto.
For Scalabrine, that meant putting his trust in Kidd and not overthinking things. Scalabrine was able to parlay his role with the Nets — including two trips to the NBA Finals — into a five-year offer from Boston. Scalabrine would have been silly not to take it. Still, he would have to tell Kidd, with whom he’d formed a friendship — and a bowling team that also featured Vince Carter in his last year in New Jersey — the news in the summer of 2005. Scalabrine went to Kidd’s backyard, where he was tossing a Wiffle ball to Kidd’s son T.J.
“He wasn’t angry. He was disappointed,” Scalabrine said. “And probably not like, ‘I can’t replace you.’ It was more, ‘Just another guy who takes off on me, just like everyone else.’ It was disappointing. It was kind of a microcosm of all the guys he’d gotten paid. And it was like he’s sitting there, ‘Why does everyone leave me?’
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“(The Nets’ assistant coaches) were like, ‘You may never, ever in your career play with another guy like this.’ … They were probably right. I never played with another guy who had that much control over the game of basketball or had that much control over winning the way that Kidd did.
“They made it very clear to me that you had better understand how special that is for you and your life.”
Career stats: G: 1,391, Pts.: 12.6, Reb.: 6.3, Ast.: 8.7, FG%: 40.0, FT%: 78.5, Win Shares: 138.6, PER: 17.9
The Athletic NBA 75 Panel points: 545 | Hollinger GOAT Points: 169.6
Achievements: Co-Rookie of the Year (’95), Six-time All-NBA, 10-time All-Star, NBA champ (’11), Assists champ (’99, ’00, ’01, ’03, ’04), Olympic gold (’00, ’08), Hall of Fame (’18), NBA 75th Anniversary team (’21)
(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Photo: Mike Ehrmann / Getty Images)
