DE-MOTION
New Nets offense a terrible fit for Lopez
How many minutes will Brook Lopez play? And how will he perform when he plays them? The answers to those questions will go a long way toward defining Brooklyn’s season.
The Nets — who play their home opener Friday versus Indiana — have put all their players on minutes restrictions. But the limits to Lopez — and his struggles with the 3-pointer happy, motion offense — will draw the most attention as long as they persist.
“It’s like a slow, steady climb. And you’ll see him go up. I do know for him it could be a little frustrating. But when we sit down and talk about it, he completely understands. So I’d say it’s a well thought-out plan,’’ coach Kenny Atkinson said.
Lopez built from 13 minutes in each of his first two preseason appearances, to 19 in his next two, and 21 in the finale. Ten Nets got more minutes in the preseason, and eight got more than the 21:12 Lopez was limited to in Wednesday’s season-opening loss in Boston, even starting the second half on the bench in favor of Luis Scola.
“It’s absolutely [getting in sync], and looking at my future in general is another thing, another benefit, being able to play for a longer time,’’ Lopez said. “We do have a schedule and timetable. ... We had a couple meetings, so we talked about it. It’s something we absolutely went over and I was aware of.”
Still, Lopez played fewer minutes than Bojan Bogdanovic (busy Olympic summer) and barely more than Greivis Vasquez (season-ending surgery last Dec. 15). In his case, this is as much about trying to shoehorn their best player into a 3-reliant offense that frankly is an ill fit.
“It’s a learning process. It’s both of us: It’s him learning a totally new system and us integrating him into a new system,’’ Atkinson said.
After being the top-scoring center in the East last season (20.6 points per game), Lopez averaged 8.0 ppg on 39.5 percent shooting in the preseason and had just seven points on 1 of 7 shooting in the opener.
Jeremy Lin, whom Atkinson has said needs to get into point-guard mode after playing last season off the ball in Charlotte, had just three assists Wednesday and shouldered some of the blame.
“I need to be better at getting Brook in the spots that he likes, and we’re in communication about that,’’ Lin said. “I’m going to keep trying to make his life easy, make his job easy.”
The Nets have to figure a way to best utilize Lopez in an up-tempo motion offense short on called post-up plays and that heaved up a team-record 44 shots from deep Wednesday.
“We’ve got a pretty good low-post scorer in Brook,’’ forward Trevor Booker said. “So to get him a couple of touches down low would probably open some things up.”
AS THE Nets franchise began its 50th season Wednesday night in Boston, the team had dressed 446 players, employed 24 head coaches and 14 general managers, had six owners/ ownership groups, and played in two leagues and eight arenas located in six different counties spread across two states.
But, through it all, they’ve had just one official scorer.
Herb Turetzky, then a senior at Long Island University, fell into the job when the Nets began life as the New Jersey Americans of the American Basketball Association and played home games at an armory in Teaneck, NJ.
Turetzky has been with the team for nearly every game since, following the nomadic Nets — they spent just one season as the Americans — from Teaneck to Commack to West Hempstead to Uniondale to Piscataway to East Rutherford to Newark and, finally, home to Brooklyn.
“It’s a 360-degree circle for me,” said the 70-year-old stat man, proud to be born and raised in Brownsville “at the corner of Thatford and Hageman, right above Bill’s Haberdashery,” in what Turetzky calls the “heart of Brooklyn,” now just eight subway stops from Barclays Center.
And when the ball is tipped there Friday night as the Nets host Indiana in their 2016-17 home opener, Turetzky willll be where he always is — at the scorer’s table, right at midcourt, with the public address announcer to his right and the clock operator to his left — scoring his 2,040th NBA game, his 1,355th consecutive. He hasn’t missed a game since May 1984, a few years before 13 of the 15 current Nets were born.
“It’s almost like, if Herb’s not there, you can’t play the game,” said longtime NBA executive Rod Thorn, a former Nets general manager and president. “He’s part of the family.”
FROM Levern Tart in the earliest days to Julius Erving on two ABA championship teams in the mid-70s, to the gonetoo-soon Drazen Petrovic, to the back-toback Finals appearances courtesy of Jason Kidd, to current star Brook Lopez, Turetzky has seen it all. He’s recorded all the points, rebounds, assists and minutes played while living and dying with the Nets.
“If you want to know the history of the Nets franchise, there’s no better source than Herb,” said Tim Bassett, a forward on the Nets’ 1975-76 championship team.
If Turetzky — who works with the certainty of a ballpoint pen because he fears a broken pencil point will slow him down — didn’t record it in his official NBA scorebook, chances are it didn’t happen. For years, he decided who got credit for baskets, rebounds and assists.
That task now goes to the four statisticians who sit directly behind him, and with whom he is in constant communication.
“Whenever I would go to Herb to ask a question during a game, he had the answer,” said Bob Delaney, an NBA referee for 25 years, now the league’s vice president of referee operations. “He knows the team fouls, the time of the game, how many timeouts each team has . . . That is immeasurable to the officiating crew.
“The guy is the Michael Jordan of NBA official scorers.”
While Turetzky counts Erving and many former Nets among his dearest friends, he also developed close relationships with NBA greats such as Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Clyde Drexler, Kobe Bryant, Isiah Thomas and Larry Bird.
While Erving, who played for the Nets from 1974-76 when they won their only two championships before joining the NBA, is his favorite, Turetzky somewhat grudgingly admits Jordan and LeBron James have surpassed him as a player. But that admission doesn’t diminish his memories of Dr. J.
“Those three years with Julius, every night was a treasure,” he said.
For all Jordan’s competitiveness, Turetzky said, he was easy to talk to.
“When the players are waiting to check into a game, we’d make small talk here and there,” Turetzky said. “My son, David, was a ball boy for six years, and I’d see the players before the games [with him].”
APHOTO signed to David hangs above a picture window in the spacious Beechhurst, Queens, apartment Turetzky shares with Jane, his wife of 46 years. It reminds David to “watch out for falling backboards.” The photo was taken the night in 1993 when O’Neal ripped down the backboard at the Meadowlands. Young David was seated on the floor under the basket — his feet visible in the photo.
Turetzky’s scoring duties may be just a part-time gig, but his love affair with basketball, which began at the Brownsville Boys Club when he was 10, is full time and everlasting.
He was an ace punchball player as a kid at PS 165 in Brownsville. But in fifth grade, a rezoning brought an influx of new students to the school. They came from another part of Brownsville, where basketball ruled.
At the time the 5-foot 10-inch Turetzky didn’t know a basketball from a beach ball, but when his new classmates saw his size, they insisted he come play at the Boys Club.
“I was bad,” Turetzky said. “But I was tall.”
There, Turetzky met Hy Gotkin, the point guard on St. John’s back-to-back NIT champions in 1943 and 1944 and a former Knick. He taught Turetzky not just to play but how to keep score and work the scoreboard.
“I didn’t like schoolwork, but I liked doing the scorebook, “Turetzky said. “I never played punchball again. I fell in love with basketball.”
Turetzky attended Thomas Jefferson HS in East New York, where his grades weren’t quite good enough to keep him eligible to play. But he had improved since those early days and continued to play basketball outside of school and against some of the borough’s best competition — future Hall of Famers such as Connie Hawkins, Roger Brown, and Billy Cunningham. Two of Turetzky’s teams won city championships representing Brooklyn.
His “hero” growing up was Tony Jackson,
If you want to know the history of the Nets franchise, there’s no better source than Herb. — Tim Bassett, power forward on the Nets’ 1975-76 ABA championship team
a three-time All-American at St. John’s who became the Americans’ first draft choice. Jackson was from the neighborhood.
Several of Turetzky’s friends played for a local amateur team coached by Max Zaslofsky, another Brownsville product who had starred for the Knicks. Turetzky often could be found “hanging around” that team.
Zaslofsky soon became the first coach/ general manager of the Americans. On opening night of that 1967-68 season, the Americans, with Jackson, were set to play Hawkins’ Pittsburgh Condors.
Brownsville vs. Bed-Stuy? What basketball-crazed Brooklyn kid would miss that showdown even if he had to drive to Teaneck to see it?
“Me and a couple of guys went,” Turetzky said. “I bumped into Max. Before we finished talking, Max said, ‘ Why don’t you score the game?’ I became the official scorer that night — Oct. 23, 1967 . . . It was very exciting.”
IT HASN’T always been slam dunks and swishes, however. A near-fatal car accident early the following season on the Long Island Expressway put Turetzky in a coma for two weeks, shattered his left leg from ankle to hip, and caused him to miss all but the first few games of that season.
But Zaslofsky held his job for him. Turetzky — the admittedly poor student who would graduate from LIU, become a teacher and earn two advanced degrees — returned to the scorer’s table the following season. He has missed just four games since.
One absence was for the birth of his daughter, Jennifer, in 1973. Another was for a back-to-school night in 1978, while Turetzky served as acting principal at PS 137.
“That night, I got home and caught the end of the game on TV,’’ Turetzky said. “I had a friend of mine, Mike Becker, score the game, and late in the game, he told the Hawks trainers they had one timeout left. But he had made a mistake. The Hawks had no timeouts and when they called one at the end of the game, they got hit with a technical foul.’’
The Nets ended up winning the game in overtime.
“After the game, Steve Hawes, the center for the Hawks, threw a towel into Mike Becker’s face as he was walking off the floor,’’ Turetzky said. “I felt terrible.”
His other two misses came in May 1984, when the Nets unexpectedly qualified for the playoffs. Turetzky previously had agreed to accompany the travel team he coached to France and couldn’t reschedule.
“It never seemed to be a task,” he said of his near-perfect attendance. “It was a thrill. But when the team was getting ready to leave Long Island in 1976 and move to Jersey, I felt like that might be the end. But the NBA office suggested they find a way to bring me to New Jersey, just for stability. I went.”
After Piscataway came 30 years in the Meadowlands. When the team announced its pending move to Newark, 20 minutes further from his home, Turetzky was sure that was the end.
“But when they put the carrot on the stick in front of me and said they were going to Brooklyn [in two years] I couldn’t walk away,” he said.
TURETZKY, a member of six Halls of Fame, including the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame, does it all with a demeanor that defies his daily struggles. A condition called spastic paraparesis, in which the brain and leg nerves do not com- municate properly, has plagued him for decades, and eventually robbed him of the use of both legs.
He now uses a scooter to get around. He has stopped driving and Jane ferries him to and from games, where they park inside Barclays Center, their minivan sharing floor space with players’ Lamborghinis and Bentleys.
Turetzky said the move a little over a year ago from the family’s longtime home in Bayside to their new apartment, with its panoramic view of Little Neck Bay — where an extra bedroom has been converted into a shrine to basketball — has given him a new lease on life.
Now he can maneuver his scooter around the apartment and down the hall to the elevator and be out on the neighborhood’s tree-lined streets in minutes.
“I’ve been reborn,” Turetzky said. “And the key to it all is I have the Nets. When I sit at courtside, no one has any idea there’s anything wrong with me. I sit up well. I look good there and I have the best seat in the house.
“I watch what I consider the greatest athletes in the world play the game I fell in love with as a kid. It can’t get any better.”