LI's Kenny Atkinson certainly has come a long way in his coaching career

No one pays attention to the coaches of an NBA All-Star Game.

The weekend is all about the players, we’re told. When Boston’s Joe Mazzulla was asked what it meant to be named the coach of the East All-Stars a year ago, he rolled his eyes and replied: “Nothing.” 

Coaching an All-Star Game isn’t supposed to be a big deal. So when the league announced last month that Cleveland's Kenny Atkinson would coach the East in Sunday’s NBA All-Star Game, Atkinson was surprised by the unexpected sense of accomplishment he felt.

His Eastern Conference-leading Cavaliers (44-10) are tied withWestern Conference-leading Oklahoma City (44-10) for the best record in the NBA.

“I’ve come a long way, right?” the Northport native told Newsday. “One of my brothers texted me, ‘These are the ones you never forget. It’s etched.’ I didn’t think I’d think of it that way. But he was right.

“You make an All-Star Game, no one can ever take it from you.”

No, they can’t, which is why it is hard not to appreciate the sort of in-your-face triumph it is for Atkinson, 57, to be recognized for being at the top of his profession only five years after being fired from his dream job — coaching the Brooklyn Nets.

The Cavaliers opened with 15 straight wins and have been the story of this NBA season. They have had the NBA’s top-rated offense and are a top-10 defense. They will head out of the All-Star break with a mindset that shows they are going for it all after dealing for De’Andre Hunter at the trade deadline last week.

Atkinson, who was hired in June to replace J.B. Bickerstaff, is the hands-down favorite to win coach of the year honors. He already has been named coach of the month twice and set   an NBA record for the best start for a team with a new coach. Atkinson also has guided the Cavs to their best record through 54 games, a significant achievement for a franchise  that featured LeBron James for 11 seasons and has reached the NBA Finals five times.

“He came in and we started rolling from the beginning,” said Cavaliers big man Jarrett Allen, who played for Atkinson with the Nets before he was traded and Atkinson was fired. “Now that we’ve been reunited and continue on the trend that we were on with the Nets before it got rerouted, it’s awesome to be a part of.”

Rerouted is a kind way to put it.  Atkinson’s journey over the past five seasons hasn’t been easy, but it has helped make him into the coach he is today. His is the ultimate tale in resiliency, the sort you like to point out to your kids when they fail to make a sports team or score what they wanted on a standardized test.

And it’s no surprise to those who have known him for years.

GETTING COMPETITIVE EARLY

When you are the seventh of eight boys growing up in a three-bedroom home in Northport, you quickly learn to go after what you want.

“It was like an army barracks,” said Tom Atkinson, an assistant coach on the Northport High School varsity boys team and the second oldest of the Atkinson brothers. “We had a community sock drawer and community underwear. You had to get there early to find the socks without the holes.''

The Atkinsons were a competitive, sports-crazed family, and no one hated losing more than Kenny, who spent hours on the backyard basketball hoop working on his Pete Maravich-style moves and challenging his older brothers.

“As a little kid, he’d lose and get so mad,” said Steve Atkinson, the third-oldest brother, who is a volunteer coach with the West Babylon girls varsity basketball team. “He always bounced back. He’d be like, ‘Let’s go again.’ You could see that competitiveness in him right away. He was going to figure it out.”

Atkinson’s ability to bounce back and learn from his disappointments goes a long way in explaining how he got to where he is today.

Though not quite 6 feet, Atkinson had major-college aspirations when he played for St. Anthony’s (South Huntington) in the mid-1980s. Even after he spent a prep year in Maine, the Big East schools he grew up watching had no interest in him and he ended up at Richmond. He helped lead the Spiders to the NCAA Tournament in 1988 and 1990 and is  best known for his 14-point game that pushed them to an upset of Bob Knight's defending champion Indiana team in the first round of the 1988 NCAA Tournament.

“He was married to basketball,” Dick Tarrant, Atkinson’s coach at Richmond, told Newsday. “He was determined to be an outstanding player. He wanted to play in the NBA, but he was such a student of the game that I wasn’t surprised he went into coaching.”

A severely sprained ankle changed Atkinson’s plan to play in the NBA. Instead, he headed to Europe, where he played 14 years, coached three years for Paris Basket and in the process learned how to speak Spanish, Italian and French.

Atkinson’s drive to be the best touched nearly everything he did. When fans in Paris joked that he spoke French with a Spanish accent, he hired a private tutor to make him sound more French.

The experience abroad paid off in the NBA, which was increasingly being populated by international players. After landing a job as a player development coach with the Houston Rockets in 2007, he was hired as a Knicks assistant and mentored Jeremy Lin. He then moved to Atlanta, where he was working as an assistant and visiting with his brother Tom when news broke in 2016 that the Nets had a coaching opening after going 21-61 under Lionel Hollins and Tony Brown. 

“We were in a bookstore when we heard and I said, ‘That would be a good spot for you,’ ” Tom Atkinson said. “Kenny looked at me and said, ‘That’s probably the worst job in the league. I don’t know about taking that job.’

“I looked at him and said, ‘They offer that job, you are going to take it.’ ”

STEADY IMPROVEMENT WITH NETS

The first year with the Nets was brutal as they suffered through a 1-27 stretch. Yet by discovering and developing players such as Spencer Dinwiddie, Caris LeVert and  Allen, they improved from 20 to 28 to 42 wins — which was interesting enough that it attracted superstars Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant to sign with them before the 2019-20 season.

It was a heady period for the Atkinson family. The brothers became regulars at home games. Atkinson’s mother, who still lived in the house where he was raised in Northport, was able to enjoy his success and his children were able to live near family. Then, after a team meeting in which the then-sidelined Durant ripped the  team, Atkinson was fired on March 7, 2020, with the Nets at 28-34.

Atkinson had achieved his dream, only to have it snatched away.

“You try to play it off like it’s not a big thing, but it was hard,” he said. “No one likes getting fired from their job. I was going to sit out for a while, but then I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to sit here and just collect a check. I have to get back in. I have to become a better coach.'

“The word coming out was I couldn’t work with [superstars]. OK, if that’s the narrative, I’m going to fix it with new experiences and learn from it and show I can do better.”

What’s happened  since has been   well documented. Atkinson first took an assistant’s job under Ty Lue and the Clippers and went with them to the Western Conference finals in 2021. Then Steve Kerr came calling and Atkinson spent three pivotal years with Golden State, including 2021-22, the season in which his new team beat Boston in the NBA Finals.

Atkinson learned how to take a more collaborative approach, especially with  superstar players. Atkinson watched how Kerr empowered his assistant coaches and players and learned the importance of paying attention to the big picture rather than sweating every detail.

Maybe the thing he learned most of all is to pick the right team. Kerr turned down the Knicks' head-coaching job before landing with Golden State and reaching the NBA Finals six times in his first 10 years, winning four titles. Atkinson passed on the Charlotte job before being hired by Cleveland. Both Kerr and Atkinson ended up with young, talented teams with two big men. Both inherited really good rosters with easy-to-coach superstars and set out to make them great.

“Every time we step on the floor, we feel like we are going to win,” Allen said when asked what the season has been like under Atkinson. “We have confidence in ourselves. We have confidence in our team. We are going out there and playing our brand of basketball.”

A coach couldn’t want anything more from his team, which is something Atkinson will try to make happen  after the All-Star break. For this one weekend, however, he’s going to celebrate with some family members in Northern California and enjoy being a part of the All-Star experience.

Yes, there’s some irony in it. The coach some said couldn’t coach superstars will be doing exactly that at a game designed to highlight the best in the league.

“I coached the Rising Stars when it was at Barclays, and now I’m coaching Jayson Tatum and Donovan Mitchell and Stephen Curry and LeBron,” Atkinson said. “I’m not going to lie. It feels great.”

By Barbara Barker

barbara.barker@newsday.commeanbarb

Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.