Nets Find New Way To Win In New Orleans
It’s been an odd first half of the season in Brooklyn, to put it mildly. The head coaching change and Kyrie Irving suspension seem like it was two years ago, not two months. The availability of complementary players has also been a daily game of hit-or-miss.
The early season troubles on the court have been erased from memory as well, with the Nets, now at full strength for two games in a row and continually growing into new Head Coach Jacque Vaughn’s mandates, on a 17-2 tear after Friday night’s 108-102 victory at injury-impacted New Orleans.
What has always been consistent, however, has been Brooklyn’s ability to score. Thanks to the supreme talents of Kevin Durant and Irving, the Nets have been in very few rock fights this season. Typically, if one of the stars is having an off night, the other tends to pick up the slack. And if that doesn’t happen, the team is toast.
That’s what made Friday’s win so odd. Durant (9-for-26 shooting) posted a sub-40% efficiency for the first time all season while Irving (7-for-22) was fortunate that he found a groove late in the fourth quarter, converting a contested bucket from the mid-paint area and then a long three-pointer, or else this would have been one ugly loss to a team missing its top two scorers in Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram.
Crazier still: This was just the second time EVER in the KD/Kyrie era that the Nets won a game—regular season or playoffs--where both players shot under 45%.
Not 35% or 40%, but 45%. The league average is 47%, according to basketball-reference.com. Though the duo has only played 86 games together including playoffs, since both signed as free agents in the 2019 Clean Sweep, that stat sounded so crazy that I had to double-check it (it turns out that I missed a win against Miami nearly two years ago when I sent out a late-night tweet that stated that Friday was the first time).
Outside of those two late Irving buckets, the two stars combined to go 7-for-25 (28%) from the floor in the second half, yet somehow the Nets managed to overcome a 64-53 deficit at intermission.
That somehow was getting back to playing together—Brooklyn registered 12 assists on 13 made field goals in the third quarter to take an 88-85 lead. Even KD, one of the league’s best isolation scorers (8th in the league in points per possession among those with at least 75 such possessions this season, per NBA.com) had all four of his third quarter baskets arising from some type of ball movement as opposed to him just walking up and taking a pull-up jumper. And then as the game went back-and-forth in crunch time, the Nets defense stepped up, holding New Orleans to 7-for-23 shooting (including 0-for-8 from three-point range) while blocking six shots.
Center Nic Claxton was a force while dealing with the handful that is Pelicans mountain Jonas Valanciunas. Claxton’s two offensive rebounds in the final six minutes were huge—the first he kicked out for a Durant three-pointer and then his forceful dunk put Brooklyn up by four points with about 3:30 remaining. Claxton’s five swats nudged him ahead of Milwaukee’s Brook Lopez for the league lead in blocked shots per game (he’s also still tops in field goal percentage).
It was also nice to see three-and-D wing Royce O’Neale get the “3” back in his game after a rough 0-fer in Wednesday’s 121-112 loss in Chicago that snapped Brooklyn’s 12-game winning streak. O’Neale put up 11 points in the second half on 3-of-5 three-point shooting plus a nifty floater off penetration.
You always have to treat postgame comments with a healthy degree of skepticism, but I found Irving’s comment about how, in this game, he didn’t let his poor shooting sour his general attitude holding a ring of truth. He mentioned his and his team’s poise, for which Vaughn deserves a decent dose of credit.
The Nets found a new way to win on Friday, though I wouldn’t recommend that they make it a habit.