Nets stunned by coach’s firing

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The winless New Jersey Nets fired coach Lawrence Frank on Sunday, a few hours before they attempted to avoid matching the worst start in NBA history.

Assistant Tom Barrise temporarily replaced his friend, coaching the 0-16 Nets against the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers.

Though Frank’s departure had been widely rumored while New Jersey lost every game in the season’s first 41‚Ñ2 weeks, Frank’s players claimed they were shocked when their energetic coach showed up at their morning team meeting in Los Angeles not wearing his Nets gear.

“It’s tough, because he was the hardest worker on the team,” center Brook Lopez said. “He’s so passionate about what he does. It was a rough situation, and he did a great job of not using our injuries as an excuse. He came in every night and had us prepared.”

The Nets won’t choose a permanent replacement for Frank until they return from their four-game road trip today. Their next game is Wednesday at home against Dallas.

Frank’s 225 victories are the most in franchise history, and he had a career .500 record before this disastrous, injury-plagued season. He also was the longest-tenured coach in the Eastern Conference, but his steady work couldn’t repair a roster featuring eight players who already have missed multiple games with injuries, following a major offseason personnel overhaul.

“He wasn’t dealt a royal flush,” said Rafer Alston, who joined New Jersey in the June trade sending Vince Carter to Orlando and gutting the Nets’ payroll. “It’s almost like he had a pair of 2’s, and he tried to fight.”

Frank, from Teaneck, N.J., replaced Byron Scott in January 2004 and began his career with a 13-game winning streak, the best coaching start in league history. His final losing streak is even longer, just shy of the 17-game skids by the 1988-89 Miami Heat and the 1999 Los Angeles Clippers.

“That’s probably as little talent as I’ve seen anybody put on the floor in the long time with everybody hurt,” Orlando coach Stan Van Gundy said. “Yet they were able to fight and stay competitive. The guy’s done a great job there.”

After 31‚Ñ2 seasons as a Nets assistant, Frank replaced the fired Byron Scott on Jan. 26, 2004.

He quickly turned around a struggling team with his record-setting start, winning Eastern Conference coach of the month honors in February after leading the Nets to an 11-2 record, a franchise-record .846 winning percentage.

The Nets made the playoffs in each of Frank’s first four seasons, advancing to the second round in three of them, before returning to their longtime losing ways while slashing payroll in recent years.

Jason Kidd was traded in February 2008, fellow veterans Richard Jefferson and Vince Carter were gone by last summer’s draft, and only the Kidd deal that landed All-Star point guard Devin Harris brought back much in return.

So after losing in the East semifinals in 2006 and ’07, the Nets stumbled to 34-48 finishes the last two seasons.

Plagued by poor attendance and heavy financial losses while playing at the Meadowlands, the Nets have been looking ahead to a move to Brooklyn. While management could make decisions with that in mind, Frank ultimately paid the price for what was happening in the present.

“I just know that with the lineups he’s had to put on the floor, I don’t think any coach would have done anything better than he’s done. There seriously can’t be people out there who think they were losing because of coaching,” Van Gundy said.

“New Jersey’s front office obviously thought they should have been winning games. Why they would have that expectation, I have absolutely no idea.”

Frank is the second NBA coach fired this season. Scott lost his job in New Orleans.