"Jason deserves a lot of credit: They're playing together," Knicks guard Allen Houston says of the Nets. "Nobody cares who scores; it's a total team. That's very rare." Granted, Kidd's brief time in New Jersey has coincided with an injury-free stretch unprecedented for the star-crossed Nets, not to mention that rare moment for an NBA club when no one is playing for a contract and everyone has plenty to prove. Starters Kittles, Martin and Keith Van Horn have come back from major injuries. Still, Kittles says, Kidd's "attitude, his approach to the game, is what really turned things around. He makes me a much better player." Kidd set the tone on opening night, playing for a half-empty house. Indiana's Jalen Rose erupted for 35 points in the first three quarters, and the Pacers led by 13 in the fourth, but Kidd didn't let the Nets panic. After Rose made two straight jumpers, Kidd said quietly to Scott, "I'll take Rose." Rose scored only one more field goal. Kidd finished with a team-high 10 rebounds, four steals and nine assists, and New Jersey won. Privately, Kidd had told teammates the night before training camp opened that things would be different this season. After being named one of the Nets' two captains, he stood and spoke as he had never before spoken to a team. "We're going to communicate," Kidd said. "No matter if what we say is good or bad, we have to communicate. If we don't, we'll be in trouble." A year ago, communicate wasn't even in his vocabulary. "Oh, hell, no," he says. Over Kidd's four-plus years in Phoenix, Ainge and his successor as coach, Scott Skiles, had great success in sharpening Kidd's practice habits but less in making him a great leader. He led by setting an example of energy and tenacity, but as one Suns executive puts it, "Sometimes a team needs direction." As Kidd himself puts it, forcefulness off the court "is not in my blueprint." All his life, his response to any clash with his mother was a stony silence, and while he and his father were best friends, Steve was not one for talking things out. To the moment Steve died, in May 1999, Jason had no idea that his father had a heart problem. "After I got the call, things began to hit me, like his not being able to get his shoes on," Jason says. "Maybe his feet were swollen. If I'd known that, I would've tried taking him to the doctor right away, but he would've stopped me. He wouldn't tell anybody if he was sick." It's no shock, then, to hear that Kidd went two months in 1996 without speaking to his last coach in Dallas, Jim Cleamons, or that, at the peak of his 1995-96 feud with Jackson, they played, dressed and traveled together for six weeks without talking. Just before Kidd was traded to Phoenix in December 1996, Jackson says, he sat Kidd down and said, "Jason, I'm not mad at you; I was disappointed because we were good friends. If you had a problem with me, you could've talked to me about it." A more impartial observer, Popeye Jones, then a Mavericks forward, says of Kidd's tenure in Dallas, "He didn't understand how to lead. He'd let a lot of stuff build up inside him, and sometimes he would explode." -- "I don't look at favorites. That's for (reporters) and fans. I just go out and play."---- Jason Kidd --

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