Before Doc Rivers took his turn talking to a gathering of front-office executives and coaches at a clinic in the Los Angeles Clippers' practice facility in August, he walked past Brooklyn Nets coach Jason Kidd and told him to listen carefully.

"Hey J-Kidd," the Clippers coach said. "This is going to be for you."

Nets assistant coach Lawrence Frank had suggested Kidd travel west with him for a two-day event that would include Pat Riley, Phil Jackson and Frank Vogel. With a notebook and pen, Kidd dutifully scribbled thoughts and concepts and ideas. Summer school has come and gone for Kidd, a session far too short for the burden awaiting him in one of the most pressurized coaching seasons in NBA history.

With the bright lights, big city of Brooklyn, with a $180 million payroll, there's no hiding in the back of the class.

"There's a lot to understand for a guy who goes right from playing to coaching," Kidd told me inside his office before the start of training camp. "Doc made the points: 'Always listen, put a staff around you and talk to the players. Tell them what you've gone through, what you see, and ask them what they feel and what they see.'

"Listen, I'm a sponge right now, trying to soak in all the information from Doc, Pat Riley, Phil, write it down, share it with my staff and flesh it out. Some of the stuff will stick, some will go away. Some of it might reappear later, because it doesn't fit the identify of this team right now."

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Three months before Kidd would lose eight of 11 games to start his NBA coaching career, before the declarations that he's a joke on the job, the weekend in California left him partly inspired, partly unnerved. The flood of information has been relentless for months, and now it is November and is coming faster and faster, the games and the losses and the criticism. The theory classes are over, and Kidd is fighting to keep his calm, his credibility and his locker room.

"It can all be overwhelming," he told me in his office that day.

Jason Kidd is lost, but he isn't a lost cause.

From Riley to Jackson, Vogel to Rivers, the coaching fraternity made Kidd reflect on his new job as a craft, about the need to blend big picture leadership and tangible, tactical X's and O's demands. He felt like a freshman in a senior seminar, the way he's buried under the relentlessness of the daily decisions now, the speed of the game, the indecision over listening to staff and management and players against his own instincts.

Coaches aren't made in weekend jaunts to California, but in hours upon hours of preparation. Repetition matters for a coach the way it does for a player. In his first job, Kidd has a blessing and curse: great talent, greater expectations and perhaps the potential for the harshest judgment a rookie coach has ever endured.

The Nets understood there would be regular-season repercussions for limiting the minutes of Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, but they've found it harder to win games without the team's two best players, Deron Williams and Brook Lopez.

Andrei Kirilenko is likely to return early next week, but he's still lost learning a new system, new teammates. Players have been coming and going so often, there's been little chance to develop cohesion and trust. People can kill Kidd for running so much isolation, so few plays, but that's been far more a product of the roster's void of cohesion than the coach's incompetence.

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