The Milwaukee Bucks badly mangled their hiring of new head coach Jason Kidd, and ended up kicking Larry Drew to the curb after just one season.
Drew ended up in a much better situation as an assistant coach in Cleveland — and Milwaukee will continue to pay his salary for the next two years — but still, he still has a bad taste in his mouth about the way things ended with the Bucks. Per the Journal Sentinel:
Larry Drew said he was “blindsided” by the way he lost his job as head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. Commenting at length for the first time since he was fired by the Bucks’ new ownership June 30, Drew said his firing was “definitely mystifying.”
Maybe the most embarrassing snub Drew suffered was having to sit at the introductory news conference with No. 2 overall pick Jabari Parker at the Milwaukee Public Market on the day after the draft, even though the owners already had talked to Kidd by that time.
“The whole Jabari thing, putting me in that position, I don’t think it was very professional,” Drew said. “I wish it wouldn’t have happened that way, but it did. […] If I had been a new coach, I might have reacted differently (to the firing). But because I’ve been in this so long and I’ve had friends who have had these type things happen to them, I was OK. This is the life we choose and sometimes you have to expect the unexpected.”
