The Milwaukee Bucks’ new owners scored public relations points early by saying all the right things upon their introduction and by drafting Duke’s Jabari Parker.

Then came the trainwreck of the firing of coach Larry Drew and hiring of Brooklyn Nets coach Jason Kidd as their new coach/majordomo of basketball.

It’s kind of a given that professional athletes will be buttheads, particularly in the National Basketball Association, where the main off-court hobby seems to be fathering multiple children without bothering to marry their mother. It is generally expected, however, that the adults in the locker room will act like adults. This apparently has not been the case with Kidd, who had domestic abuse and alcohol issues during his playing days. There is not much evidence that, unlike former coach Scott Skiles, Kidd has actually grown up and stopped acting as if his age was his uniform number.

As bad, on a different level, is how Kidd engineered his exit from Brooklyn. Following one season as coach, when the Nets did well during half of the season, Kidd apparently decided he deserved more authority and campaigned with management to be moved above the Nets’ general manager in the hierarchy. Management declined, and so Kidd started talking with his friends the Bucks owners.

The Sporting News contributes this:

There is a certain decorum with which a coach in the NBA — and, indeed, a coach in most any major pro sport in the country — is expected to carry himself. Safe to say that, in the last few days, recently departed Nets coach Jason Kidd has violated several of them. Or, at least, the one that matters most.

“I think the one thing you know not to do as a coach is to talk about another job while it is still occupied,” one veteran NBA coach told Sporting News. “You just don’t do that. This is a tough business, there are only 30 jobs and no matter what you think of a guy, every one of us puts his heart and soul into what we do every day. And so you learn to respect your colleagues. But nothing is more disrespectful than gunning for someone’s job while he is still in it.”

What’s worse is that Kidd appears to have done this three times in a matter of days. First, Kidd attempted to usurp the general manager’s role with the Nets from Billy King, having seen Stan Van Gundy get the same broad powers in Detroit and Doc Rivers granted that title with the Clippers. But Brooklyn team ownership, led by Mikhail Prokhorov, had no interest in giving Kidd that level of power.

New Bucks owners Marc Lasry and Wes Edens then came into play for Kidd, receiving permission from the team to speak to him last week — Lasry was a former minority owner with the Nets, and knows Kidd personally.

That’s when Kidd attempted to sell the Bucks on an arrangement by which he would both run and coach the team. Problem is, the Bucks have two people doing those jobs already — coach Larry Drew and general manager John Hammond.

King. Drew. Hammond. That’s three employees Kidd attempted to oust. Kidd eventually came away with the job as Bucks coach, with Milwaukee sending 2015 and 2019 second-round picks to the Nets, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports first reported. Drew was never informed of the negotiations with Kidd.

What’s worse, it appears that one of Kidd’s motivations was resentment over the bigger financial packages awarded to Steve Kerr in Golden State and Derek Fisher in New York, each of whom reportedly got five-year, $25 million deals. Both of those coaches, like Kidd, are former players who have never been on a coaching staff before — not only as a head coach, but not even as an assistant. …

The coach also pointed out that this is one of the perils of hiring a coach with no experience — he has no sense of paying dues, no sense of how hard some coaches, like Drew, have worked to get where they are. Kidd is acting like a spoiled brat, perhaps because he never had to earn anything in the coaching business.

I’ve argued here before that the positions of general manager and coach need to be separate, at least in pro football. That more likely than not is the case in other pro sports as well. General managers acquire players by draft, trade or free agent signing; coaches coach them. Those are two full-time jobs, and given that Kidd apparently isn’t necessarily a candidate for Mensa, to think he can do both jobs seems optimistic at best.

Kidd supposedly wants to become the Bucks’ answer to Phil Jackson, possessor of several NBA championship rings and now president of the team he played for, the New York Knicks. Jackson was a role player on two NBA championship teams, but apparently while he wasn’t playing he was paying attention to what coach Red Holtzman was doing. Additionally, unlike Kidd, Jackson learned how to coach by coaching in the Continental Basketball Association (as did former Bucks coach George Karl). One season is really not a large enough sample size to determine if someone can coach.

The supposed upside here is Kidd’s supposed ability to get free agents to play in Milwaukee because he was able to get a couple to come to Brooklyn. (Which might be an indictment of Kidd’s coaching ability since the Nets didn’t start playing well until the second half of the season.) Milwaukee is not Brooklyn, and whether Kidd can duplicate that feat remains to be seen. Moreover, Kidd eventually will run out of player contemporaries who he supposedly can attract to Milwaukee to play.

None of this should be viewed as a defense of former coach Larry Drew (who is being paid handsomely to have read that he was about to be replaced) or general manager John Hammond. The Bucks deserved their record as last season’s second worst team in the NBA, and I saw little evidence of improvement. (Teams should never tank to improve their next-season draft position.) But I’m not sure at all that Kidd represents actual improvement.

The Wisconsin State Journal’s Tom Oates reinforces my point:

Kidd, who has alienated people throughout the NBA over the last 20 years, was available only because his own power play had been rebuffed by Nets ownership. He tried to oust general manager Billy King — the man who hired him despite his complete lack of coaching experience — and gain control of all basketball decisions in Brooklyn, but the Nets instead seemed eager to let him move on. That should have told the Bucks owners something right there, but apparently they weren’t listening.

The way [Marc] Lasry and [Wesley] Edens handled this entire matter — especially interviewing a prospective coach when they already had one under contract — shows either a lack of character or an amazing amount of naivete. It was cutthroat or clumsy or both, all of which bodes poorly for a franchise that is coming to the plate for its final at-bat in Milwaukee and can’t afford to make mistakes.

The immediate response to the Kidd news was that these are the same old dysfunctional Bucks. They still have owners who think they know more about basketball than they actually do and like to meddle in decisions they’re not qualified to make.

And speaking of unqualified, there is nothing in Kidd’s resume that would qualify him to run the basketball operations in an NBA franchise. He was a point guard for 19 seasons and a coach for one, but he’s never spent a day in an NBA front office.

Still, the Bucks’ starstruck new owners seemed willing to hand their franchise over to him. Perhaps they should have asked why the Nets’ owners, who are more familiar with the NBA and know Kidd better than anyone, weren’t willing to give him that control. …

But just because Kidd was hired only to coach the team doesn’t mean this story is over. His desire to make personnel decisions likely hasn’t changed and, given the clout he carries with the new owners, it’s only a matter of time before he has both jobs. …

Of course, if Kidd has success as a coach, much of this will be forgotten. But it seems like only a matter of time before Kidd is in control of the team’s basketball decisions, and that ought to scare everyone.