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EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. – Brooklyn Nets coach Jason Kidd flashed his phone into assistant Lawrence Frank's line of vision and let him see the name blinking into the caller ID.

"Should I take this?" Kidd asked, knowing the answer anyway.

They were standing behind the team's bench, involved spectators to a Nets summer-league game, and still Kidd understood the consequences of the TV cameras and eyes in the gymnasium. Here was the "gotcha" moment for the freshly retired superstar who was seemingly so uninvested in his first NBA coaching assignment that he had left the bench for a telephone call.

"I knew everyone was watching," Kidd said recently inside his office in the franchise's practice facility.

Frank told Kidd he had to take the call.

"Just walk out," Frank said.

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The call had come from Russia, free agent Andrei Kirilenko wanting to be convinced of his chances to chase a championship on a discount. Kidd's walking out of the gym to take the call would ultimately go viral on the web, but nothing happening in that Orlando gym could've approximated the importance of the coach's need to recruit the best free agent left on the market.

Kidd understands appearances now, the suggestions that he'll be an ex-player trading high-tops for wingtips who won't take seriously the craft of coaching, the hours and purpose needed to make the transition.

He has lived a professional life of scrutiny, but the ball's no longer in his hands. Control is gone, passed onto his players now. He's learning that affecting winning and losing no longer comes in dramatic moments with the world watching, but in the long, lonely hours of preparation and solitude.

[Related: Nets thinking title, but not for winning Atlantic]

The criticism "had already started with me not holding the clipboard during a [summer-league] game," Kidd told Yahoo Sports. "Maybe it's fair. Maybe it isn't. But it comes with the territory."

His eyes fluctuate between a visitor across his desk, and a wide-screen television high on the wall where Kidd can watch his Nets playing pickup ball and working out.

The screen, the prism, changes for him now. After Brooklyn general manager Billy King made the bold hiring in June, Kidd was soon on the practice floor with Frank and his assistants preparing the franchise's young players for summer league. For all the extraordinary floor vision that elevated his greatness as a player, an innate ability to see the game develop at different angles, different speeds, Kidd made a startling revelation coaching his first practices: In this job, that gift had an inconsequential, if any, benefit to him.

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