He had them at hello, Brooklyn.

Give the team's general manager, Billy King, credit for at least making sure that friends in the industry would not think him insane with this hire.

He contacted his old college coach, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, who had Kidd on the United States Olympic team, and was told, great idea, way to be bold. He got an endorsement from Rick Carlisle, the Dallas Mavericks' coach, who used Kidd so effectively two years ago while winning the N.B.A. championship.

King flew in Brian Shaw to give at least one candidate with coaching experience the opportunity to talk him into a more conventional hire. But Shaw would have had to promise Phil Jackson as his lead assistant to send the bullet train with Kidd on board back to the station.

Before Shaw could be handed a Junior's cheesecake and sent back to the airport, the Nets were planning a posh news conference for Thursday in the Barclays Center atrium.

There was no time to waste, or wait, even to determine if there was any weight to the new speculation on the highly desirable Doc Rivers looking for a way out of Boston. After Jackson and his 11 rings, Kidd was suddenly the second-best Nets fantasy. He was the just-retired baller with the loudest buzz, the surest bet for the tabloid back pages the way he once was for the baseline cutter going backdoor.

The large news media contingent — greeted by posters welcoming Kidd back to a place he had visited this season only as an opponent — paid immediate dividends.

"I know everybody was talking about the sexy name," King said, disagreeing. "But what's the sexy name? You guys determine that by what you write."

So color the media transparent and credit the Nets for knowing what a feast Kidd would be for the beast, with his Hall of Fame playing credentials and his Vin Diesel veneer.

King had to insist that the decision was never about the Nets still acting like the New Jersey Nets, doing everything possible to make people pay attention. But the track record of the franchise since Mikhail Prokhorov became its owner obscured those denials. Since Prokhorov, a Russian multibillionaire, arrived to joke, "I come in peace," the Nets have done everything they promotionally could to make war with the Knicks.

Now they have Kidd, less than two weeks removed from the Knicks' roster, and whether one believes this move to be brash or harebrained, the only conclusion to be immediately drawn is this:

Even dressed up as a 49-win team in their handsome arena in the middle of a promising new market, the Nets acted very much the part of a team trying to maneuver its way out of Madison Square Garden's shadow.

Nets. Jets. Mets. All three teams rhyme and reside in the same existential place: second in their respective sports in the New York City market. They deal with different competitive conditions and phenomena but similar inferiority complexes born of that old Avis ad campaign, We Try Harder. Sometimes too hard, as the most glaring case of recent vintage, the Jets in the Tim Tebow debacle, would attest.

Did the Nets overreact, handing a win-now veteran team to a coach on training wheels? King said several times that all hires, especially coaches, are risky in the most general sense. But his time with Kidd convinced him that Kidd had coaching greatness inside him.

Kidd could start by finally being the one to successfully manage the many moods of Deron Williams, which have tended to make him less than the sum of his many talented parts. The opposite, you might say, of Kidd in his prime.

"It starts with Deron," Kidd said, nodding to a smiling Williams in the audience.

Kidd also promised to diversify the Nets' offense by not having Williams bring the ball up on every possession. That's a nice thought, but Williams is the only Net holdover with Kidd-like court vision. Kidd will soon discover that those skills are not transferable, or teachable.

Between the lines, Kidd over 19 years was always the ultimate team player. Outside the lines, he could be an operator of the highest order. But as a rookie coach, Kidd should at least be as appreciative as he is hardworking. With two coaches fired in the last six months, King has gone out on what could be a very rickety limb for Kidd, who five years ago wanted no part of the Nets in any location.

Dwelling on that experience, he began to say something unflattering about "East Rutherford," but caught himself, changed direction and praised Bruce Ratner, the former owner he once couldn't get far enough away from, for his vision as builder of the arena in Brooklyn.

The team, for better or worse, is also built, with a couple of aging, untradable players. Kidd must know he is not stepping into a low-pressure, learning-curve situation, given Prokhorov's expectations of title contention.

The core that came up empty in the first round of the playoffs against the Chicago Bulls' junior varsity will not change, King said. If healthy, the Bulls will be even better next season. So will emerging Indiana. LeBron James isn't leaving Miami just yet. And the Knicks still have a team that won five more games than the Nets.

With Kidd as coach, the Nets can reset the conversation and promise, We'll Try Harder. They're still No. 2, but the buzz is louder in Brooklyn.