Nets’ Hot Streak Set New Standard…And Tightened Slack
Fans and the media have given the Nets a vast swath of slack this season.
Why nitpick the negative when it was clear that this team was put together to plummet to the league’s lowest depths in order to secure the highest odds possible for the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery? After all the trades and buyouts of veterans, the squad was left with Cam Johnson, D’Angelo Russell, and a bunch of guys 25-and-under, many of whom barely belonged at this level, never mind receiving consistent doses of minutes in an NBA rotation.
So when a legitimate title contender like Cleveland pulled away from Brooklyn after Russell exited with a sprained ankle in last Thursday’s second half, we all took a Tony Soprano-esque “What are ya gonna do?” attitude. We shrugged it off because it was meant to be.
Similarity, if Nets Head Coach Jordi Fernandez opted to put the ball in the hands of league-minimum players like Keon Johnson or Trendon Watford in crunch time, you couldn’t really bash him when the alternatives with Russell and Cam Thomas sidelined weren’t exactly appetizing. This is what tanking teams are supposed to do anyway.
Only the Nets players and coaching staff have shown that they aren’t really on board with that mission. They have won enough games, including 7-of-9 heading into Monday’s tilt at Washington, to be in the running for a play-in seed. Even if they suddenly went into a full-bore tank mode over the final 25 games, they’d probably still finish with somewhere around the fifth-best lottery odds. Since they continue to send out their most productive performers in close games, we can assume they’d prefer to leave the tank by the side of the road.
Well, if that’s their expectation, it seems to me that they’re all fair game now for any failures to meet those standards. The latest example: A 107-99 defeat to the Wizards, the second time in the last ten games that Brooklyn has fallen to the NBA’s worst team.
From the new perspective, it’s inexcusable. Washington had lost its previous six contests, including getting blown out by 20 points the previous night in Orlando. Good teams are prone to the occasional upset when they disrespect an inferior opponent; given the Nets glaring lack of offensive talent, there isn’t a team they can beat if they don’t put forth a full effort, and they got rightfully singed.
After the Wizards opened the game with a 21-7 run before five minutes had expired, Nets Head Coach Jordi Fernandez made a hockey line change, subbing out all five starters. Understand that Washington is last in the league in offensive efficiency and second-to-last in three-point shooting percentage. Yet they came out shooting 62% overall and from deep in the first half to take a 67-59 lead against a Brooklyn defense that had been surrendering a league-best 97.9 points per game over the prior nine games.
Fernandez has been receiving much love for the job he’s done all season with a collection of misfits and ne’er-do=wells. He’s as much a reason why the tank has gone sideways as anyone. However, he was outcoached on Monday, slow to adjust to Washington’s scheme to beat Brooklyn’s at-the-level hedging of pick-and-rolls with pocket passes and quick kickouts to three-point shooters, and then he was unable to find ways to take advantage when the Wizards went small in the second half.
You’d have thought that it was the Wizards who were the defensive, um, wizards with the way veteran Marcus Smart and sophomore Kyshawn George locked up Brooklyn in the fourth quarter—the Nets went 3-for-16 with the two Johnson’s combining to go 1-for-9 and Watford committing four turnovers in the frame.
The Nets had arisen from their first-half slumber by using an aggressive switching defensive foundation to force nine Washington turnovers during the third quarter, but by then the Wizards had cleaned up their defensive glass (the Nets had 12 offensive rebounds in the first half and just four thereafter despite the lengthy stretch with no Washington center on the floor) and were the steadier club in crunch time to pull out their 10th victory of the season.
The loss was the proverbial ice bucket dumped on the Nets’ heads after Saturday’s thrilling 105-103 win at Philadelphia on center Nic Claxton’s buzzer-beating putback. That win had put Brooklyn within a half-game of 10th-place Chicago for the final Eastern Conference play-in seed.
It also tightened the slack they ought to be receiving.