Milwaukee Bucks head coach Jason Kidd underwent a successful right hip arthoplasty on Monday morning.
It is unclear how long J-Kidd will be kept off the sidelines as he recovers from the hip replacement, but he is hopeful that he will be able to return to coaching the Bucks relatively quickly. In the meantime, assistant coach Joe Prunty will fill in as the head of the Milwaukee coaching staff. Jason is confident in his staff’s ability to keep the young team rolling.
“We’ll know more as we go along, but hopefully in two weeks I can be back at the office,” Jason said on Sunday. “Joe Prunty will take over and he will run the team. No one gets out of their lane. Joe will still be offense and
[Sean] Sweeney will still be defense. The guys have to continue to develop. This is for us to get better as a team. It’s in good hands with the coaching staff—we’re built as a round table and so Joe is well qualified to keep these guys going in the right direction.”
Dr. Edwin P. Su and Dr. Riley J. Williams performed the procedure at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York to repair the chronic injury that has affected J-Kidd as a result of his 19-year Hall of Fame-worthy career. Jason logged more than 50,000 minutes—making him just one of five players in NBA history to hit the 50K minutes-played plateau alongside Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Kevin Garnett and Elvin Hayes.
One of the highest activity players in NBA history, Jason is fifth on the league’s all-time list of three-pointers made (1,988) and ranks second behind only John Stockton on its assist charts with 12,091. But all that action has left the Bucks coach in chronic pain, often unable just to get a good night’s sleep.
“It’s been chronic for the last three to four years, since I was in Dallas the last time,” Jason said. “Some would say that’s the 55,000 minutes that I tried to play. A lot of wear and tear on my body and I’ve been blessed not to have too many surgeries, but this is just one that has taken away from me being able to sleep and function.”
The 42-year-old has tried to put off the operation, quelling the pain with cortisone shots, but the time has come where an operation is the only remaining route.
“The pain has been to the point where I can’t function,” J-Kidd said. “I’ve taken enough cortisone shots that they don’t work and now this is the last procedure to do the surgery. We’ve put it off as long as we could. This is what we have to do. I have to fix myself and then we move on and we get back to work.”
Coach Kidd joins Golden State’s Steve Kerr as the point-guard-turned-coach who is now on the NBA coach inactives list. As he looks forward to a couple of weeks on the injured reserve list, he said that he hopes Coach Prunty can duplicate the success of the Warriors under Luke Walton in Kerr’s absence, also due to surgery.
“It wouldn’t be bad for Joe to take what Luke has done,” Coach Kidd told the media. “I wouldn’t be mad. No pressure for Joe.”
Just as Jason isn’t concerned about Prunty’s ability to lead the Bucks in his stead, J-Kidd is also confident in his team’s ability to stay focused and motivated. He maintained that he’ll remain in contact with his team as much as possible while he’s out.
“I think they’re [the players] tired so I don’t think they really understood what I said,” Jason joked at the end of the team’s long West Coast road trip. “I think overall, the guys understand and respect what I have to do. And, understand that I will still be in contact with those guys on a daily basis to help, the coaches and players.”
The Bucks start their stint without Kidd at home on Wednesday against the Philadelphia 76ers. Next they’ll host the Toronto Raptors. After that, Milwaukee hits a four-game road trip from Dec. 28 through the New Year at Dallas, Oklahoma City, Indiana and Minnesota.
