MINNEAPOLIS — Nets that don’t play hard all the time are going to have a hard time playing.
So says the mentor who best knows new Brooklyn interim head coach Kevin Ollie.
Ollie played for — and won under — Jim Calhoun at UConn. Then he served as an assistant coach under Calhoun in Storrs, before eventually succeeding him as the Huskies’ head coach. And through all that, Calhoun told The Post he saw Ollie work, work and work some more.
And he’s fairly sure the Nets’ new coach — named to replace the fired Jacque Vaughn last Monday — is going to demand the same. It’s what he demanded of his UConn team that he coached to a 2014 NCAA title.
Ollie may not be the same verbal taskmaster as Calhoun, ready to give his players a tongue-lashing. But taking over a 21-34 Nets team that, frankly, has been underachieving and outworked for the past two months, he’s given them a mandate coming into their game Saturday in Minnesota to either hustle or sit.
“He’s not me or Danny [Hurley, current UConn coach] in some ways, no. [But] he’ll be on them,” Calhoun told The Post via phone. “He will demand [effort]. The one thing he’ll demand is that they play the way he played. Not many guys without a lot of offensive talent last 13 years in the league. If he had to be the 13th man, he was that. If he had to be a defensive specialist — because he was a really good defender — he’d be that.
“It’ll be no question that if you don’t put good effort in — I have no idea what his verbal responses will be — I do know that you’ll probably be sitting beside him. There’s going to be purpose and work, because that’s how he played and that’s how he coached for us at UConn.”
And that’s pretty much how Ollie has lived, worked wrapped around the DNA of him.
Not gifted as an uber-athlete, Ollie worked hard enough back at Crenshaw to earn a scholarship to UConn, where he built himself into a standout collegian. Over his last two seasons with the Huskies, they went a combined 57-10 with two Big East Conference regular-season championships and a 1995 Elite Eight berth.
“He worked his ass off,” Calhoun said.
But even that wasn’t enough to get him to the NBA — at least not right away.
Ollie had to spend two more seasons toiling in the old Continental Basketball Association. He finally got his foot in the door with the Dallas Mavericks, made a stop with the New Jersey Nets in 2000-01 and ended up with a 13-year, 12-team odyssey through the league — all of it against the odds.
A 6-foot-3 guard who has more seasons in the league than 3-pointers hit?
Nobody would believe that story if you told them.
“I would have told you he would’ve never played in the league,” Calhoun said. “But he willed himself into playing in the league. He worked hard as heck.”
That’s how Ollie stayed in the league so long and why he was respected so much.
A coach on and off the floor
Ollie’s final season in 2009-10 was spent in Oklahoma City, the old head grownup in the locker room brimming with young talent. And all that talent looked up to him. It still does. Kevin Durant told Bill Simmons on a Grantland podcast in 2014 that Ollie “taught him the ropes” and that his presence “changed the culture” of the Thunder.
“Kevin Ollie, he was a game changer for us,” Durant said. “I think he changed the whole culture in Oklahoma City. Just his mindset, professionalism, every single day. And we all watched that, and we all wanted to be like that.
“It rubbed off on Russell Westbrook, myself, Jeff Green, James Harden. And then everybody who comes through now, it’s the standard that you’ve got to live up to as a Thunder player. And it all started with Kevin Ollie.”
If it was a coach-on-the-floor experience for Ollie, he immediately went “home” to begin coaching in earnest. He served as Calhoun’s assistant in Calhoun’s final two seasons — winning a national title in 2011 — before actually succeeding the UConn icon in 2012.
He took over a team that was ineligible his first season due to prior infractions. In his second, he guided them to a 32-8 record and victory over Kentucky in the NCAA championship game, making him one of just four African-American coaches to win an NCAA men’s basketball title.
Though Ollie’s stay in Storrs ended poorly — he was fired after an NCAA investigation, and successfully sued the school for back pay — the relationships he built there didn’t.
“I’ve found Kevin to be a really good person,” Calhoun said. “I know this thing was difficult for everybody, you know, lawsuits and all that. I have nothing to do with it. But he’s one of my guys. … I know one thing; he won’t not succeed for lack of work. He will work.
“He made himself into a player, played (13) years in the league without a jump shot. That doesn’t happen with 6-3 guys. And he’s a good people person. His teammates like him, he’s still very close with all my guys, Donny Marshall, Ray [Allen] and Scott Burrell and so on. So I wish him the best of luck. I hope he does exceptionally well. But as far as the administration piece, the university, it’s unfortunate.”
But it’s what brought Ollie to the Nets now.
The Nets had tried to pry him away from UConn back in 2014, fresh off his national title, after the departure of Jason Kidd. They were foiled, though, by a $5 million buyout in his contract for the NBA and settled on the disastrous Lionel Hollins.
Now, full circle, they finally got their man.
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The task ahead
Just months after joining Vaughn’s staff this past offseason, Ollie now has been thrust into the lead chair.
While Ollie is roughly the same age as Vaughn, a longtime friend from high school days in Los Angeles, they’re very different. He may not be as much of a taskmaster as Calhoun, but he’s much more direct and high-decibel than Vaughn.
“Probably just be a little more detailed. That’s pretty much it,” Mikal Bridges said of Ollie. “They both coach differently, you know. I think KO is more just like loud and on you, but JV is not. That’s just not the personality he has. It’s just different.”
After a particularly galling loss to Charlotte on Nov. 30, Vaughn had let Ollie give the pre-game speech before the next game against Orlando. It was blunt, to the point and effective. The Nets then thrashed what had been a red-hot Magic team 129-101.
Now Ollie is going to have to motivate a squad that has looked unmotivated.
The Nets have lost 24 of their last 32 going into Saturday in Minnesota. And their refusal to get back on defense in his debut Thursday at Toronto was appalling.
The Nets were outscored 46-7 in transition points, per Elias Sports Bureau, tying the most fast-break points allowed by a team all season (Dallas allowed as many on Nov. 14 vs. New Orleans) and representing the worst margin in the league all season.
“We’ve just got to keep calling it out,” Ollie said. “We’ve got to demand that we change it, because it’s…going to continue to beat us if we don’t change that.
“If they hit us, we’ve got to make sure we hit them back, and I don’t think we did that [in Toronto]…We have to be the ones that [foes] are matching our intensity; and that’s what I’m gonna talk about — the sense of urgency. We will get better.”
