Coaching is not just what you can see: the rotation, the x’s and o’s. It’s often more about what you can’t: player development, managing up as well as down and player interaction.
For Jacque Vaughn and Ben Simmons, that last piece was a mess at the end of last year. There was no trust. An exasperated coach talked publicly about how frustrated he was with the player who had his own frustrations with not being able to perform through pain. And not everyone on the Nets believed his issues were purely physical.
As Marc J. Spears, who’s written about Simmons extensively this year, recounts, the trust building process was long and difficult but in the end it worked.