Their lucky night
Nets use furious rally to erase 28-point deficit, stun Celtics in Boston
BOSTON — The old Nets essentially ended last month during a trip to Boston.
The new Nets may have begun there Friday night with a landmark win.
After struggling since they traded away Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, the Nets broke a fourgame skid with the first signature win of their post-superstar era. And they did it with the biggest comeback in the NBA all season, a 115-105 Mikal Bridges-led victory before a stunned sellout crowd of 19,156 at TD Garden.
Trailing by 28 in the second quarter, the Nets put on a 51-19 blitz that spanned intermission and changed the game — and perhaps the direction of their season.
The rally matched the biggest comebacks in franchise history, achieved Feb 16, 2022 at the Knicks and March 19, 2019 at Sacramento. And it was a template of what the Nets now hope to look like, with Bridges’ scoring backed by active defending.
“We were [switching] onethrough-four in a drop. Then we went one-through-five, and we stayed with it. We were doing really well. We were just covering for each other,” Bridges said. “That’s the biggest thing. You make mistakes, we’re all human. But is your brother going to pick you up and step up for you? And your other brother going to help the next guy? We did a great job at that.”
The last time the Nets played at TD Garden — a 139-96 loss on Feb. 1 — seems like years ago. It was an entirely different era, with Irving first vowing to figure out a way to get past the juggernaut Celtics, then two days later demanding a trade that broke up the Nets’ supposed superteam.
In their return to TD Garden, the Nets showed the first hint of a promising future. They had lost six of seven since Bridges and Cam Johnson arrived from Phoenix in the Durant trade. On Friday, however, Bridges poured in a gamehigh 38 points and grabbed 10 rebounds. He shook off a minor knock to the knee and looked every bit the part of a team building block. And Johnson shook off a slow start to add 20 points on his 27th birthday.
“We just started adding up those stops, and that wears on teams,” Johnson said. “There was a point in that first quarter, early second, where we looked at each other and said, ‘We’re not going out this way.’ It brought us together. The only way to get through things is to do it together and go through it together. That resilience we showed was big.
“And you have to give a lot of credit to Mikal Bridges. He came out and hit big bucket after big bucket, tough bucket after tough bucket.”
Bridges had scored 30 points just twice in his career before arriving in Brooklyn, but has cracked that barrier three times in his past six games. This time, he outdueled Jaylen Brown, who led Boston with 35 points. And Johnson helped hold Jayson Tatum (22 points) to 0-for-7 from behind the 3-point arc.
The Nets needed all of that to dig out of a hole of their own making. They trailed 13-3 right out of the gate, a deficit that swelled to 51-23 on a Brown layup with 7:23 remaining in the first half.
But the Nets — who had allowed at least 30 points in 13 of 17 quarters since returning from the All-Star break — suddenly rediscovered their defense. They made stops, which let them run and get into early offense.
The result was that extended 51-19 run.
Johnson’s free throws with 6:11 left in the third quarter put the Nets ahead 72-70, and Nic Claxton capped the run to hand them a 74-70 lead with 5:41 left in the third.
Spencer Dinwiddie, who had 17 points and eight assists, padded the lead to 106-90 on a step-back 3-pointer with 6:54 to play. The rest was garbage time — but shockingly, the Nets were on the right end of it.
“We’ve been in this situation, what, three times now?” Dorian Finney-Smith said. “So it was either shy away from it or take the challenge. And we took the challenge, stayed together. That’s a great team, so we got to a team effort and that’s what it was.”
BRITISH actress Daisy May Cooper stars in “Rain Dogs,” a dark comedy about an unconventional family premiering March 6 on HBO (10 10 p.m.) and also available on HBO Max.
The series, created by author Cash Carraway, is set in England and follows struggling and impoverished single mother Costello Jones (Cooper), her daughter Iris (Fleur Tashjian) and Costello’s best friend Selby (Jack Farthing, “Poldark”) — a wealthy gay man who is Costello’s pseudo “soul mate” and Iris’ father-figure.
“It’s an unconventional love story, really,” Cooper, 36, told The Post. “[Costello and Selby] are from opposite ends of the spectrum. He’s very affluent, she’s poor, and they’ve both been neglected in different ways and haven’t got the skills to have a normal healthy relationship, so it gets toxic.
“But it’s just such an interesting relationship that I’ve not really seen onscreen before,” she said. “That was really exciting to play — and really truthful.”
“Rain Dogs” tracks Costello’s efforts to hustle to make ends meet and provide for her daughter, which sometimes gets her into sketchy situations in which she need Selby to bail her out. He’s got his own problems too, having recently finished a stint in jail.
Cooper ( HBO’s “Avenue 5”) also starred in and co-created the British mockumentary series “This Country” with her brother, Charlie Cooper. (Its American incarnation is Fox’s “Welcome To Flatch,” starring Sean William Scott.”).
Cooper said that, like Costello in “Rain Dogs,” she grew up in poverty. Costello works at a peep show — and Cooper said she could relate to that experience.
“I remember auditioning to be a stripper when I was really poor and about 18 or 19, and how bleak it is,” she said. “I was working as a cleaner for about 100 pounds a month. I went in for an interview for washing dishes in a restaurant,
after drama school. I didn’t get the job … The only thing available that will always recruit is the f–king sex industry. And I remember being angry about that. Because you’ve got seedy men looking at you, and you think, ‘You’ve got no idea how talented I am, or where I want to be, or what my morals are.’ You just see a pair of t–s. People who come from a stable upbringing don’t have to put themselves through that sort of stuff.”
Cooper said that filming “Rain Dogs” brought up memories from her past that, “I suppose I haven’t dealt with.”
She recalled a time when she was 20 and living under one roof with her brother and her parents. “It was like ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’ [My brother and I] were working as cleaners because our parents were both unemployed and couldn’t get jobs at the time. It was hell.”
They lived outside of London, but she had to take a bus there for an audition for the show “Call the Midwife.”
“I had to take 9 pounds out of the family’s food budget to get a [bus] to London. I only had one pair of shoes, these sandals that had fallen apart, and I had to tape them, and walk from Victoria coach station into Central London,” she said. “I remember feeling so anxious, because I had such a stressful time just even getting there … That’s what Costello goes through on a daily basis. It would be so easy for anyone else. That’s what reminded me [of my life] so much. I was terrible in the audition, and you go ‘Of course I was,’ because there was so much invested in it. And I had to go back and tell my family, ‘That was really bad.’
“I’m grateful there’s a show that’s as gritty as ‘Rain Dogs.’ It’s not poverty porn. It’s being real.”