The problem with Jason Kidd is he's not very good. In a league with a lot of good coaches, that puts the Dallas Mavericks at a disadvantage.
Now, I need to be clear. Jason Kidd is a far better coach than I could ever be. I think any assumption to the contrary is stupid. However, we are not comparing Jason Kidd to me. We're comparing him to the other 29 coaches in the league. How many coaches would you take Jason Kidd ahead of?
So it might be time for the Mavericks to start thinking about some new, out-of-the-box candidates. I have three in mind.
3. Four eggs, stacked vertically
You know what's hard? Not spilling drinks. You know what else is hard? Balancing an egg on top of another egg.
They just don't want to do it. They're just like "uh, um, uh, no. We are round, and we refuse to cooperate." Then they fall over and crack. This is why you boil the eggs beforehand.
The thing is, though, I'm not sure if boiling the egg is cheating to make it easier or making things harder. When it's not boiled, the non-shell part of the egg is all whooshy and moves around. Is that good or bad? I think it might mean that everything will eventually settle into the best balance and that cooked egg could lock an out-of-balance egg in place, which would be bad.
And those are qualities you find in a good coach. It'd also give Mark Cuban a chance to reapply his proprietary toasting technology. Sure you also want your coach to have good basketball acumen, emotional intelligence, and sentience, but are we sure that four eggs stacked vertically wouldn't think to spam Luka and Kyrie pick and roll and reverse pick and roll?
It's hard to say, really.
2. A large language model
I asked ChatGPT what the basketball play "horns" is. I now know what answer it gave me. That doesn't necessarily mean I know what "horns" is. It means I know what ChatGPT thinks it might be. I have reason to believe that is not necessarily right.
But it's gotta be close enough, right? Like, I bet you could get a large language model to draw up the best play for you out of timeouts and everything. Maybe it'll have a little animation of a little X cutting and another little X throwing a little ball and the little ball goes in a little hoop. That would be so cute.
One thing a large language model will not do is make the same decisions that Jason Kidd would make every time. And by virtue of the large language model not being Jason Kidd, one could argue that automatically puts it at least a level above Jason Kidd. How far above is yet to be seen.
But large language models are built on the data they find. Assuming the model is continuously finding more data, perhaps that means people could influence the decision-making. Say enough people mention "bring back Spencer Dinwiddie because it'd be funny" in blog posts or on Twitter, the large language model will be like "this is important" and start doing it. I think that's reasonable to assume.
I'll be honest, I don't know exactly how they work. I just know they are really popular. Or at least they were about a month or two ago. Maybe they're better now? Or maybe people have moved on? I don't know. I stand by this recommendation though.
1. An iPad and the animators from the Red Bull commercials
What if instead of planning a play for after a timeout, we watch a quick animation of a dog on a skateboard? Neat, right? It's one of those things where the inspirational message more than makes up for the lack of tactics.
But that's thinking small time. That commercial already exists. I'm thinking every break in the action means a brand new Red Bull commercial-style animation for the players to enjoy.
How nice would that be? You go out there for your stint. You play hard, maybe you score some points, maybe you're winning, maybe you're losing, all I know is you did your best. Oh, there's the whistle. I wonder what coach "drew up" for us this time. Oh look, it's a squirrel in a rider lawnmower. Ha. Nice one coach. I'm going to play so much harder now.
Or maybe you're on the bench, and while you're paying attention and cheering on the team, you're also storyboarding some ideas with the coaching staff. Leiland's squirrel idea killed it. But we have something super top-secret planned at halftime with a special appearance by Jason Sudeikis. I can't wait. The boys are going to love this.
Compare that to the Jason Kidd experience. I don't have much of a vibe with his personality, but I feel like his head would be annoying to be around. There's something about it. The way that it's shaved, maybe. It's just wrong. I know I'm not the only person who feels this way. Would you rather be around that or an entire creative enterprise and maybe some screen time if you're good?
