ROCKY ROAD
Banged-up Nets routed by Nuggets
DENVER — The altitude, the injuries, the back-to-back games: Take all the excuses and flush them.
Here’s the bottom line. The Nets didn’t handle the ball, couldn’t handle Denver’s Nikola Jokic, and got handed a 112-104 loss to the Nuggets that was more lopsided than it sounds.
“We just gave it up. We coughed it up too easy,” coach Kenny Atkinson said. “I just don’t think we had the requisite juice. The execution wasn’t good. It was like we were walking in mud in everything we did.”
Oh, the Nets were about as sloppy as a mud pit. After winning Monday in Phoenix they trailed by 25 the next night. Playing without injured big men Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, Trevor Booker and Quincy Acy, they got lit up by Jokic. And they fumbled away the game along with the ball, with D’Angelo Russell the biggest culprit.
Brooklyn (4-7) committed 25 turnovers, with their point guard guilty of eight.
“Man, no excuse. I’ve just got to be better,” Russell said. “I’ve just got to be better, more focused. I think it was really on us, just being real nonchalant, starting with me being careless with the ball and just not valuing it.”
The Nets allowed a career-high 41 points to Jokic, who fouled out with 2:59 left and walked off to chants of “MVP! MVP!” from the Pepsi Center crowd of 14,058. And the Nets certainly made him look like one, letting him go 7-of-12 from mid-range, 4-of-9 from deep, burned again by a stretch five.
“We’ve got to learn how to play on back-to-backs. … We kind of took the night off. That’s something you can’t do in the NBA,” DeMarre Carroll said. “You can make all the excuses in the world. But you’re in the NBA; it’s your job. We’ve got to learn, and we’ve got to learn quick.”
Carroll had to start at power forward against Paul Millsap (17 points), and Tyler Zeller got extended minutes and responded with a team-high 21 points, his best outing since 2015-16. The Nets were shorthanded enough to play Jake Wiley 21 minutes, and call Isaiah Whitehead (who’d been in the G-League) at 10 p.m. on Monday, put him on an 8 a.m. flight and hand him 15 minutes.
It’s telling that Atkinson called Whitehead their best point guard Tuesday night.
The Nets fell behind from the start, down 28-17 in the first quarter on a 3-pointer by Will Barton (17 points). It was still an 11-point deficit at the break and 76-61 midway through the third. But after one egregious span where Russell had his seventh and eighth turnovers in a 12-second span, Atkinson yanked him.
“I want him to get better. He’s like the quarterback that throws two interceptions. Those are tough to overcome,” Atkinson said. “And we talked about it at halftime, so I brought him out, talked about it, and said ‘Improve.’ So we’ve just got to help him.”
Carroll, already a veteran presence in the locker room, is already doing just that.
“We actually had a long conversation in my room,” Carroll said. “At the end of the day he’s just trying to feel his way in, coming from the Lakers where it was all open, one-on-one.
“So right now he may be overthinking it a bit. But it’s the same thing when I was in Atlanta with Jeff Teague doing the same thing. I told him go look at film of Teague and see how he adapted to it; because at the end of the game we’re going to need him, his scoring. It’s growing pains. He’ll learn. He’ll definitely be better.”
He better be soon, for the Nets sake.