NEW YORK -- Deron Williams interrupted a vacation in Anguilla, showed up Thursday in a sharp gray suit and hung off to the side of the lobby at Barclays Center, listening to his good friend Jason Kidd's first press conference as head coach of the Brooklyn Nets. Now let's see if Williams shows up more for Kidd than he did for the last two head coaches the Nets have had in the last six months. Because what Kidd needs Williams to do now is to be the "Second Coming" of Jason Kidd and turn the Nets into NBA finals contenders, much like Kidd did on his arrival as a player in 2001.

Kidd -- a first-ballot Hall of Famer who retired from the Knicks just 11 days ago after 19 NBA seasons -- was a far better player at his absolute peak than Williams has been so far. But Williams was a better player in Utah than he's been for the Nets. When Williams spoke to reporters Thursday, there he was, pining yet again for those salad days of his, as if he had nothing to do with not recapturing them. Asked about Kidd's plans to run a more up-tempo offense, Williams said, "I definitely like to get out and run. That's what we did in Utah."

Can D-Will be the Second Coming of Jason Kidd? Steven Freeman/NBAE/Getty Images

The Nets' new head coach had to be someone Williams, their $98.7 million point guard, could get enthused about, if only because the gap between what Williams could be for the Nets and the player he actually has been didn't come close under Avery Johnson, whose offense he didn't like. He was marginally more dynamic for interim coach P.J. Carlesimo, who didn't come into the job with anything close to the footing Kidd does.

Williams pinpointed other flaws in the Nets after their grating Game 7 loss in the first playoff round against the Chicago Bulls, who played without Kirk Hinrich (except for Game 1) and Luol Deng, and never considered asking Derrick Rose to shake off a year of rust. And still the Nets got spanked.

"After we won Game 6 [in Chicago] we felt like this was our series," Williams admitted then. "We talked about the word inconsistency all year ... [and] toughness, mental breakdowns. We just tend to have stretches, whether it be a quarter or two quarters, where it seems like the wheels fall off all at once and we can't get it back ... You can't do that if you want to be an elite team."

The Nets didn't come close to being an elite team last season. But they could have won more than the 49 games they did. Their intensity was constantly in question; during their playoff series, a Bulls beat reporter actually said the Bulls were privately saying the Nets were "gutless" and heartless." Joakim Noah even guaranteed the undermanned Bulls would win Game 7 on the Nets' home court. And when they did, Nets forward Gerald Wallace was even more critical than Williams, bitterly conceding that Chicago "came out with a sense of urgency. And we didn't."

How does that happen? How does Williams let it happen?

"Yeah, you could say we underachieved last season," Williams said Thursday. "It was a learning experience ... [A lack of toughness] is something that definitely hurt us in the playoffs."

Not good enough.