Kevin Ollie has been named interim head coach of the Brooklyn Nets after dismissing Jacque Vaughn on Monday.
The 51-year-old joined the team’s staff as an assistant this season, his first working on the bench of an NBA team. A former guard who patched together a 13-year NBA career, Ollie rose to prominence as a coach with UConn, winning the national championship in 2014 and an American Athletic Conference title two years later.
His six-year stint ended in 2018 following a 14-18 season but was at the heart of controversy shortly after when UConn was slapped with two years of probation and Ollie with a three-year show cause for “failing to monitor staff, not promoting an atmosphere of compliance, and allegedly providing false or misleading statements to NCAA investigators.”
In 2022, he was awarded $11 million from UConn after winning an arbitration hearing that questioned the “just cause” cited by the school to avoid paying his buyout, which was worth the same price.
Following a three-year absence, Ollie returned to coaching in 2021 with Overtime Elite — a league for 16-to-20-year-olds. He quickly garnered interest from NBA teams and was a finalist for the Detroit Pistons’ job last summer, which ultimately went to Monty Wiliams.
With the Nets, Ollie takes over a team that is in the middle of a nosedive. They went 21-33 in the first half but went 6-18 in their final 24 games before the All-Star break. The final straw of Vaughn’s two-year stint as Brooklyn head coach was a 50-point blowout loss to the Boston Celtics on Feb. 14.
Brooklyn officially returns from the All-Star break on Thursday where they take on the Toronto Raptors. With 27 games left in the season, they are just 2.5 games out of the final Play-In spot in the Eastern Conference.
This story first appeared on amNewYork Metro, a Schneps Media sister site.
