Jeremy Lin: Nets' new head coach Kenny Atkinson helped create 'Linsanity'
The Brooklyn Nets announced the hiring of Kenny Atkinson as their new head coach on Sunday, a name that is unfamiliar to even the most rabid of NBA fans.
Atkinson has toiled away as an assistant coach with the Hawks for the past four seasons, and with the Knicks for the four seasons before that. But for Nets fans looking for any signs that he is indeed the one to finally bring a winning culture to the franchise, here's something from Jeremy Lin that speaks to Atkinson's ability to make things happen.
"I mean this guy wakes up at 6 a.m. every morning," Jeremy Lin said of Atkinson, back in 2012 as a member of the Knicks (via the New York Post). "I'll text after a game at midnight, one o'clock when I go home, and I'll say, 'Hey, can I look at those turnovers? Can I look at the upcoming team? How they run pick-and-rolls?' And he'll have the film ready when I walk into the facility the next morning.
"When I wasn't playing much, we were working out before practice, and after practice, he was picking apart my game, teaching me what it's like to play in coach [Mike D'Antoni's] system."
That was during the period known as "Linsanity," when Lin took New York (and the rest of the nation) by storm with several amazing performances in February of that season. Lin was in just his second year in the league, and came literally out of nowhere to dominate at the NBA level in the league's largest market.
Atkinson's job at the time was to do exactly what Lin describes. But the work he put in with what was then a seldom-used player really paid dividends, and it provides some exciting evidence that the Nets may have made a very wise choice.
