Nets unable to keep up with Curry, Warriors
OAKLAND, Calif. — After dropping their first three games of this road trip in the final minute, the Nets didn’t have to worry about that Tuesday at Golden State. They lost this one in the third quarter.
Brooklyn fell 114-101 to the defending champion Warriors in front of a sellout crowd of 19,596 at Oracle Arena.
After the Nets overcame the second-biggest run in the NBA this season, another Warriors run put them away. They have dropped 12 of their past 13 games, and 16 of their past 18.
“We’ve just got to keep grinding until we get that breakthrough,” DeMarre Carroll said before the game. “Hopefully, we can get it sooner rather than later, but at the end of the day, we’re trying to build something here and trying to continue into next season.”
Brooklyn coughed up a 25-0 run, tied for the second-bigger in the league, but still had a five-point halftime lead. But the Nets gave up a 22-5 surge that spanned the third and fourth, and that one was too much to undue.
Stephen Curry had a gamehigh 34 points for the Warriors (50-14), who also got 19 from Kevin Durant and 18 from Klay Thompson.
D’Angelo Russell — who had been benched for the final 15-plus minutes of Sunday’s loss to the Clippers in favor of red-hot Caris LeVert — was active, engaged and efficient with 22 points and eight assists. Carroll scored 19 and Spencer Dinwiddie added 13 points for the Nets (20-45), who fell to 0-4 on a five-game road swing that ends Thursday in Charlotte.
The Nets were made to look like the Washington Generals against the Globetrotters, then — even more shockingly — flipped the script on the champions.
Clinging to an early 14-10 lead, the Nets surrendered a mind-bending 25-0 run over the next five minutes. They missed all seven of their shots, while letting the Warriors hit 9-of-10, including 3of-3 from deep.
By the time it was over, they trailed 35-14 on Curry’s running 3-pointer with 58.3 seconds remaining in the first quarter. As eye-opening as it was, nobody could have predicted what came next.
The Nets, who couldn’t buy a stop early, held the Warriors to 6-of-19 shooting and forced nine turnovers the rest of the way in the first half.
Brooklyn outscored them 39-13 the rest of the way — the fewest points the Nets had surrendered in any quarter all season — to take a 53-48 lead into the locker room. But while the Nets largely held Durant and Thompson in check, JaVale McGee rose up to punish them. He had three dunks in a 9-2 run to open the second half that put the Warriors back up 57-55.
The rest of the third quarter was a back-and-forth affair, Russell giving Brooklyn a 76-73 lead on an 18-foot pullup jumper with 2:39 left in the period. But the last extended run belonged to Golden State, a 22-5 surge that settled the game for good.
The Warriors took an 86-80 edge into the fourth, and by the time Thompson capped the run on a short pullup, they’d padded it to 95-81. The clock read 9:16 left in the game, but the contest was over. The Nets didn’t have another rally in them.
“Of course we’re frustrated. But I look at the glass half full. We’re there against good teams,” Nets coach Kenny Atkinson said. “We’re giving ourselves a chance’ now we’ve got to break through. It’s part of the growth process of a young team. Sure they’re frustrated, but I’d be more frustrated if we were getting blown out by 20. That’s the real frustrating ones.” brian.lewis@nypost.com