Nets won’t get picky
Brooklyn can’t fret about Celts bounty
There’s at least one member of the Celtics organization who doesn’t care a bit about the next two drafts, and the team’s control of New Jersey’s two firstround picks over that span — part of the bounty from the trade involving Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett.
“I worry about scoring the ball, getting my teammates involved and winning games,” Isaiah Thomas said last week. “I don’t know nothing about those firstround picks. And I wasn’t a first-round pick, so I don’t care about first-rounders.”
Down in Brooklyn, firstyear Nets coach Kenny Atkinson would like to get his mind off those picks for another reason. At this point any thought of what the Nets can’t control takes away from the process.
And Atkinson refers to the ‘P’ word at least as much as Celts coach Brad Stevens.
“I was fully aware,” Atkinson said of knowing the draft vacuum he was inheriting upon taking maybe the worst job in the NBA. “I understand the situation. For us, we never even address it. We don’t talk about it and we’re focused on our team. I think Sean (Marks, the Nets general manager) did a great job bringing in a group that’s fun to coach, a group that’s gonna compete and so that’s all we’re focused on right now.”
The young Nets almost gave the Celtics more than they could handle in Wednesday’s season-opening 122-117 loss to the C’s, and Atkinson wants his players to focus on short-term issues.
“Pretty positive. We’ve tried not to do too much, not to install too much, offensively and defensively keep it pretty simple,” Atkinson said. “We’re starting to get some of it, and we’ve obviously played a lot of different lineups. Discovering ourselves in preseason too.”
Relief comes with the knowledge that he can start working on mundane things such as rotations.
“Yeah, that’s a relief. Preseason is over and we can really get down to playing how we’re going to play, playing our main guys. Looking forward to that,” he said. “We tried to approach preseason like they were real games. At our stage in development we tried to treat it like the regular season. Sure (weren’t) in the regular season and the players (knew) that. We tried to keep a real in-season routine for the exhibition season.”
It’s not an easy goal, but Atkinson, much like Brett Brown in Philadelphia, now must shut out the noise — like those projections that have the Nets finishing at the bottom of the league, and giving the Celtics the best odds at the top pick in the 2017 draft.
“We don’t talk about projections. We don’t talk about win shares. We’re really — it’s a cliché but — we’re so focused on the process, so focused on our team, so focused on team development and player development,” he said. “We’re going to measure those. But that being said, we’re competitors. I think all of us, I think all those guys in the room, they’re coming in here to get a win. So all of those long-term projections and building and all that, I think tonight that goes out the window. When that ball is tipped up we’re going to compete as hard as we can to win the game.”
And take a lot of notes along the way. Center Brook Lopez, the veteran in an otherwise youthful mix, will shoot more 3-pointers this year. And he’s using the Celtics’ Al Horford as an example of how to stretch the floor.
“It’s just looking at everyone in Atlanta, they moved the ball well, they shared the ball, it was something they all worked on,” Lopez said of Horford’s former team. “It was known around the league that in their practice that everyone worked on shooting 3’s together . . . they worked on the ball movement . . . so in the game he had the confidence to pull the trigger.”