KD Couldn’t have Been Happy With Nets’ Habits Watching Loss To Lowly Spurs
Hopefully Kevin Durant, who did not make the Nets trip out West so he could concentrate on rehabilitating his MCL sprain, was too busy with therapy to watch his teammates drop their third straight game without him, 106-98, in San Antonio on Tuesday night.
For Brooklyn’s superstar couldn’t have been too pleased with the club’s habits in perhaps their most winnable game on the schedule during his reported four-week absence, even with fellow star Kyrie Irving also sitting out as a late scratch due to a calf injury. Against the god-awful Spurs, the Nets committed 21 turnovers while shooting 3-for-23 from three-point lands, a recipe for disaster.
There is no other way to put it other than it was embarrassing. Perhaps more concerning was that this wasn’t a fluke either—it wasn’t one of those “make-or-miss” league games, in my view. If the Nets utilized the same lineup and game plan against this lowly team on the road 10 times, they might beat them twice. Brooklyn started a unit that was sorely lacking in speed, athleticism, and scoring, which was why it shouldn’t have shocked anyone when they got down, 23-9, after nine minutes.
Combined with a slightly less gross performance in the second half, the starters as a group shot 6-for-19 with 8 turnovers in 11 minutes together, per NBA.com. The three-man lineup of Royce O’Neale, Joe Harris, and Seth Curry by themselves was outscored, 37-15, in the 14 minutes they shared the court. Playing them with non-shooters Nic Claxton and Ben Simmons offset their usual gravity.
Brooklyn got a little juice from inserting sophomore Cam Thomas and league minimum free agent acquisition Edmond Sumner in the second quarter. Their quickness to get to the basket helped the Nets erase the deficit and the game was tied at 51-51 at halftime.
Unfortunately, Head Coach Head Jacque Vaughn must not have gotten the memo during the intermission that his starting five was a poor matchup in this game; only this time, the Nets’ bench was unable to bail them out again, with the Spurs maintaining the lead for the final 19:12 of game action.
The Nets, despite the sound bites emanating from their locker room after the game, did not generate a relatively high volume of quality looks. Sure, they (I’m looking at you, Joe Harris) missed some wide open three-pointers, but on many possessions they first had a difficult time freeing themselves to receive passes, never mind creating space to get off a good shot.
And this was against the worst defensive team in the league, whether measured by total points or points per 100 possessions allowed. San Antonio, which boasted only a couple of NBA starting caliber players, held their opponent to under 100 points for just the third time all season.
Vaughn helped a similarly undermanned Nets squad engineer a 136-133 upset in Indiana on December 10. On Tuesday, he seemed to forget that his club was missing its two offensive virtuosos. He put too much on the plate of Simmons, who finished with one of the worst triple doubles you’ll ever see when you factor in his seven turnovers and six missed bunnies in the paint on 10 attempts.
Vaughn also had no answers for Spurs wing Keldon Johnson, who went off for 28 of his game-high 36 points in the second half, mostly on drives into the paint. No zones or box-and-1s. Not even getting in his defenders’ ears to force Johnson’s dribble to his left, as Richard Jefferson aptly pleaded during his analysis on the YES broadcast.
So much for Brooklyn being “better equipped” to handle Durant’s absence than they were last season, when the team went 5-16 and dropped like a stone in the standings. KD later said that particular stretch, with the “bad habits” formed, was one of the reasons why he submitted a trade request to Nets management last summer.
I’m not going to say things will get worse, because you can’t do much worse than Tuesday’s loss. But, as I wrote in my previous post, the Nets need to play differently, starting with Thursday’s contest at banged-up Phoenix, and it won’t get any better.
And then all eyes will be on KD to see how he reacts.
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Who had Game 3 of the post-KD injury in the “When will Kyrie Irving bag on the Nets pool?”
To be clear, I have absolutely no clue how hurt Irving really is. He was seen on the Nets bench on Tuesday night so hopefully he won’t be out for an extended period.
This latest injury, however, continues a pattern of his missing games where the Nets were counting on him to step up in a leading role. Irving was only able to suit up for 12 of KD’s aforementioned 21 missed games last season because of his refusal to be injected with the COVID-19 vaccine in violation of New York City’s mandates. In 2019-20, Irving’s first campaign in Brooklyn when Durant was on sabbatical recovering from Achilles surgery, he played 20 games before shoulder woes shut him down for the season, including the August resumption in the bubble. The following season, Irving played through Durant’s 23-game absence, but by then James Harden had been acquired to handle the heaviest lifting.
Irving is a sublimely gifted player, perhaps the greatest ballhandler this league has ever seen and a ridiculously creative finisher from all three levels. But he’s never fared well as The Guy—though he hit one of the most clutch shots in league history to earn his NBA championship ring with Cleveland in 2016, folks don’t forget that he was Robin to LeBron James’ Batman on that team.
Once Irving returned from his suspension over promoting hateful and antisemitic content on his social media, he had a productive start to this season, averaging 26 points per game as Brooklyn’s stellar second option on a 48.8/36.6/90.7 shooting split through the January 8 contest in Miami where Durant went down. In the following two games, however, his game fell off, with his numbers dropping to 19.5 ppg on 36.4/22.2/75 shooting.
Irving, who opted into the final season of his four-year contract in the offseason, is a pending free agent. No team, including the Nets, should question his talent when it comes to deciding whether he’s worth a max contract. It just has to be weighed against his reliability issues--self-inflicted or legitimately out of his control.