GETTING SET FOR

Celtics are a perfect litmus test to see who these Nets are

Where Brooklyn at? We’re about to find out. The Nets are hoping to contend for a championship and planned to treat Friday night’s exhibition against the Boston Celtics like a regular season game. New faces, no chemistry, trade rumors, it’s all semantics.

The Nets will be judged by wins and losses just like every other team, and this was an early measuring-stick game. How this star-led group performed against a tested, “more formed” playoff team in the Celtics could tell us exactly where these Nets are.

“It is great for us to play a really good team. This is a contender, a team that’s been deep in the playoffs repeatedly,” Nets head coach Steve Nash said before the game. “Great talent, great coaching, culture. They have those common experiences. They’re running this back for years, three, four, five basically.

“It’ll be a great challenge for us to see a team that’s a little more formed than we are, that’s been there done that, that has a little bit of common knowledge.”

The Celtics lost Gordon Hayward to the Charlotte Hornets in free agency, but will be a perennial contender for years behind Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Marcus Smart and Bronx’s own Kemba Walker, who will not play in Friday night’s exhibition due to a knee injury.

The Tatum-Brown-Smart trio, in particular, has been a force in the playoffs since 2017, when they made the Eastern Conference Finals despite Kyrie Irving’s season-ending knee injury.

The Nets, on the other hand, snapped a two-year playoff drought with two consecutive playoff appearances. The players who led last year’s team — Caris LeVert, Spencer Dinwiddie, Joe Harris and Jarrett Allen — will see new roles with Irving, Kevin Durant and DeAndre Jordan taking the lead in Brooklyn.

Speaking of new roles, LeVert is coming off the bench against the Celtics, playing that Manu Ginobili-like role Nash spoke of earlier in the week. The Nets coach said he has not made any permanent decisions on the rotation.

“There are so many variables this year that I’m not going to make big proclamations or decisions just because we have so many variables going into it,” Nash said pregame. “If both are healthy, they’ll both play a lot, and both be prominent and I’m very, very lucky as a coach to have both those guys in my lineup.”

For what it’s worth, Nash used similar wording again when asked about whether Jordan would start over Allen.

Allen had been the Nets’ long-time starter until midway through last season, when Jacque Vaughn’s first move as interim head coach, after Kenny Atkinson was booted, was to promote Jordan to the starter. Vaughn later started Allen in the Orlando bubble, where he was a standout.

“I think DJ will start again tonight. There’s nothing really in it between DJ and JA,” Nash said. “They’re both very good players, similar profile, and will both play a prominent role.”

Nash is going to have to balance this roster and rotation decisions against a Celtics team that has long known its identity. What they don’t know is whether their young talent can truly compete with the league’s premier superstars. or the Nets, this litmus test poses the opposite; The talent is there, but can that talent compete with a complete team?

“I think it’s one, important that we get an exhibition game in before we start on Tuesday,” Nash said. “But two, it’s great to play one another, top team in the East, contender that we can really kind of measure where we’re at at this moment in time.”

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