The sideline persona is no act.
The mix of distress and passion that contorts Kenny Atkinson’s face and body language each night, indifferent to the scoreboard, never fully goes away. The Nets coach is busy guiding of one of the NBA’s most-improved teams, winning much more than he had in his first two years on the bench, and yet he finds himself unable to relish it.
“I don’t enjoy one second of this,” Atkinson deadpanned Tuesday after practice. “I really don’t.”
Atkinson wanted that taken in context, not to be heard as a complaint.
“I love the game, I love the organization, I love the players, but you just have this constant pit in your stomach,” Atkinson said. “I told my wife [Monday] night, I said, ‘The anxiety only leaves after a win.’ That moment from the win [until] you have your dinner or whatever, and then this morning you wake up and you’re worried about Washington, and, ‘Man, we gotta get that one, what an important game.’ It’s just a little window where the anxiety disappears.”
In that sense, there have been some less anxious postgame meals this season for Atkinson. After going a combined 48-116 over the last two years of the rebuild, the Nets enter Wednesday’s meeting with the Wizards at Barclays Center with a 32-30 record, still in sixth place in the Eastern Conference, where they have resided for just over a month.
But there are still just 4 ½ games separating the Nets from 10th place, and with 20 games left, Atkinson is not about to stop agonizing over every decision or fighting for every possession from the sideline.
“His fiery competitive self, that’s enjoyment for him,” Caris LeVert said.
“How he looks when he’s coaching during the games is how he is in practice, how he is when he’s doing film,” Joe Harris said.
The results have entered Atkinson into the Coach of the Year conversation. He may have some tough competition, including his mentor Mike Budenholzer, whose Bucks own the best record in the league a year after being the Eastern Conference’s No. 7 seed, and Mike Malone, whose Nuggets have gone from out of the playoffs to crashing the top of the Western Conference’s hierarchy.
“I think [Atkinson] could be top three,” Jared Dudley said. “He’s been everything and more, to be honest with you. He holds guys accountable, he’s respectful and thoughtful of certain ways and of keeping guys engaged when you’re not playing, communicating what you need to do. So he does everything the right way.”
Now, Atkinson is facing one of his biggest challenges — “Probably the hardest part,” Dudley said. He kept an injury-riddled group together and winning during the middle of the season, and now that the Nets are nearing full health — only Spencer Dinwiddie (thumb) is still missing — Atkinson is trying to figure out how to get them all playing time, keep the group happy and, most importantly, still win.
“I think that’s where you got to trust your locker room, trust the characters that we have here,” said Atkinson, who has not played Dudley or Rondae Hollis-Jefferson the past two games. “That being said, I expect frustration.
“I think that’s on me to communicate with those guys really well, like I’m not leaving them on an island and keeping them in the mix and keeping them involved with what we do. Because we’ll need them.”
In the meantime, the pit in Atkinson’s stomach will remain. The organization he has invested so much time into is closing in on a playoff bid and there’s little time in the day-to-day grind to think about the big-picture reward.
“I feel like teams reflect their head coach and I feel like we reflect Kenny,” LeVert said. “He’s competitive, very competitive, but also he gives us a lot of confidence.”
