In some ways, the borough of Brooklyn and Lionel Hollins are very much the same. In others — and maybe the ones that matter — not so much.

Hollins, now the fourth coach of the Nets in the last two years, has been a fixture in the NBA since the Portland Trail Blazers selected him as the number six pick of the 1975 NBA Draft. In 1977, when Portland won its lone NBA title, Hollins was considered one of the best point guards in the league. A scrappy all-NBA First Team defender who had the unique ability for his position to play without the ball, Hollins was particularly adept at converting catch-and-shoots off Bill Walton’s virtuoso high-post passing game.

That was nearly 40 years ago, when the Brooklyn Navy Yard was still building ships and Junior’s Cheesecake was fresh off its 25th anniversary. Today, that same Navy Yard is comprised mainly of a movie studio, and Junior’s is closing its first restaurant in six decades to make way for yet another upscale condo project.

The Association has morphed, too. Now, it’s a of lattice of increasingly complex coaching moves (Hello, Jason Kidd!), statistical optimization, and revenue maximization. Hollins has survived this vicious temporal paradigm like a 100-year-old brownstone flanked by newly erected corporate towers. With 17 years served as an assistant coach prior to his head coaching responsibilities for the Memphis Grizzlies, he remains an old-school fundamentals guy who speaks plainly, demands maximum effort, and isn’t shy about sharing his views about the “statistics revolution.”

Hollins’ ascendance in Memphis was, in some ways, analogous to a story we see again and again today: floundering neighborhoods are made prosperous by quality local merchants, only to see conglomerates swoop in and take over.

When he took over midway through the 2008-’09 season, the Grizzlies were, per usual, a massive reclamation project that was averaging a league-worst 12,500 in attendance per game. The roster was full of young players with promise, but not even the most optimistic Grizz fan was predicting deep playoff runs anywhere in the near future. Rudy Gay and O.J. Mayo were frustrating high-volume scorers, point guard Mike Conley appeared only serviceable, and Marc Gasol’s future was murky, at best, due to fitness issues.

The following offseason, Memphis acquired volatile power forward Zach Randolph — and his heaping $16 million contract along with him. A drifter who would call Memphis his fourth NBA home in as many years, Randolph had been routinely dismissed due to poor conditioning, troubled behavior on-and-off the court, and an inability to adapt his powerful yet plodding low-post style to the sleeker, faster modern game.

Amazingly, by the end of the 2012-’13 season, Hollins had guided the Grizzlies to 56 wins and a new media consensus on the team’s fortunes: dark horse contender. Three players — Tony Allen, Conley and Gasol — earned All-NBA Defensive honors, and Randolph and Gasol combined (when healthy) to form the most menacing low-post / high-post game in the league.

The Grizzlies’ “grit and grind” defense allowed a league-low 89 points a game (per Basketball-Reference.com) — an astounding number, given the league’s rule-bending in favor of a faster game predicated on 3-point shooting. Home attendance rose to a respectable 18th in the NBA.

Despite his success, Hollins found himself in the wrong place at at the wrong time. Memphis had hired advanced analytics guru and former ESPN rock star John Hollinger as the team’s Vice President of Basketball Operations, and suddenly, there were too many cooks in the kitchen. Hollins, old school as he is, predictably clashed with Hollinger. The first kerfuffle allegedly took place when the Grizzlies traded Rudy Gay, a solid defender whose ability to score was belied by a middling Player Efficiency Rating (PER) — a analytical tool developed by, you guessed it, Hollinger. Soon after, the proverbial straw reportedly broke Hollins’ back, when he yelled at Hollinger for addressing “his” players during practice. Hollins was out of a job soon after.

Today, the Barclays Center is a $1 billion, 365-day-a-year entertainment tour de force nestled in the heart of Atlantic Yards, a constantly evolving residential and commercial “success story.” Median rents in the area, of course, have seen dramatic increases, which has forced many of the small artisan businesses party responsible for the neighborhood’s renaissance to flee. The median age in the area is just 34 years old, and the local atmosphere feels smothered by an intense millennial ethos.

The Nets seem right at home in the midst of this corporatizing of downtown Brooklyn. In fact, both the neighborhood and franchise feel inexorably linked by their transformations.

So how, exactly, will Hollins fit in? There will be no slow rebuilding of the Nets; no cultivation of young, malleable talent. Team owner Mikhail Prokhorov and general manager Billy King have built the Nets via spendthrift acquisitions of players well past their primes — “assets” that are practically immovable in today’s market. Absent significant salary dumps, Brooklyn is on the books for $90 million next year and is facing more luxury tax payments; the Nets paid an additional $90 million this past season, according to reports.

Unlike with Memphis, Brooklyn’s roster is not flush with the type of players that would seem to benefit from the guidance of Hollins’ strong hand.

Deron Williams is now 30 and injury-riddled. Even when healthy, he’s become a passive defender, habitually struggling to muscle through screens, and rarely keeping up with the healthy crop of young Eastern Conference guards blessed with wicked first steps. Brook Lopez has only been in the league for five years, but two of those have been cut short by season-ending foot injuries. Joe Johnson will turn 33 during this, his 14th season in the league.

Each of the three core Nets have contracts that are probably untradeable. Getting them to play Hollins’ way —a fundamental, old school style that emphasizes pulverizing team defense and crisp movement without the ball — feels like a long shot.

With the Nets floundering, a counter-culture force like Hollins is being brought in to right to ship. Similarly, downtown Brooklyn once needed artisans and small merchants to reclaim the territory from the urban blight which had enveloped it. It will be up to Hollins to try to heal a franchise, which, in the last two weeks, has lost its $7.5 million head coach (Jason Kidd), its integral two-way glue guy (Shaun Livingston), and probably its future Hall of Famer (Paul Pierce) to free agency.

The reclamation may fail, but Hollins probably won’t be to blame if it does. His style should serve as a reminder that the forces that laid the foundations for Brooklyn and winning basketball alike, still exist. If you look hard enough, you can still find a few brownstones with old gentleman playing their saxophones on the stoops.

Let’s just enjoy that vibe — from the locals and from Hollins — for however long they last.