Run for your life
New-look Nets find playing fast their best chance of surviving
The Nets were getting their tails kicked Friday night in Boston when they responded with a simple concept: Pace. They started pushing the ball at every opportunity, running off Celtics misses, even running after Celtics makes. And not only did it result in the biggest comeback in the NBA this season, but also it provided a template for how the Nets want to play.
No, make that a blueprint of how these new Nets need to play.
“Yeah, it’s just the team. Coaches talk about transition and getting out and the guys we have, we’re all unselfish and play the right way,” Mikal Bridges said. “We all can run the lanes and get out. So that’s why we always want to get stops, because I feel like we’re a tough team in transition. So that’s just the emphasis that we had, just getting out after getting stops, go in transition trying to get easy ones.”
The Nets played much slower before the trades of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, understandably leaning on the 30-something stars to cook in isolation. But that was a month ago. A different world ago.
If the Nets have any chance of being competitive in their post-superstar era, they’ll have to run. And they’ve started to do precisely that. They’re first in the league in pace since the All-Star break.
Better defense will lead to faster — and better — offense.
“Yeah, everyone is learning on the fly,” said Spencer Dinwiddie, who was acquired in the Irving deal.
“If we can solve [the defensive] side of the ball and hold teams in the 100 [point] range, then we give ourselves a great chance to win, because odds are we’re going to score above that just being able to play fast in transition. Since we got here our pace is second in the league, so we’re going to get some attempts up: Hopefully those open 3s start falling a little bit.”
The pace didn’t pick up immediately upon Dinwiddie and the other newcomers getting to Brooklyn, but close enough.
Dinwiddie and Dorian FinneySmith arrived on Feb. 9 from Dallas. If the Nets were deliberate, the Mavericks were downright glacial as Luka Doncic ran iso after iso, for the second-slowest pace in the league. Two days later, Bridges and Cam Johnson came from Phoenix in return for Durant, and the makeover was underway.
Friday may have been the best picture so far of the Nets’ new blueprint.
“We started getting those stops and that led to some transition buckets and just got some flow,” Johnson said.
Through Irving’s finale with the Nets on Feb. 1, the Nets were just 21st in the league in pace at 98.93.
The Nets now are in flux with four new starters. But in five games since coming out of the All-Star break, they’ve easily led the league in pace at 103.80. And they’ve topped 103.5 in the past four.
“Offensively, we paid off by getting off and playing with pace,” coach Jacque Vaughn said. “Our small-ball helped us to get rhythm shots, and as they were running back in transitions our cross matches really paid in our advantage. Some really good things for our group.”
A couple of cross matches late in the first half Friday typified that.
The Nets trailed 56-34 when Vaughn pulled center Nic Claxton and went small with 3:50 left before halftime.
With the Nets down 22 after a Marcus Smart pull-up, Dinwiddie took a quick inbound and pushed the ball. Robert Williams III was guarding Royce O’Neale in transition, but O’Neale dragged the Boston center to the right to clear space and Dinwiddie found Finney-Smith wide open on the left for a 3-pointer.
Then, even after Williams answered with a dunk, Dinwiddie pushed again off a make. He got all the way through the paint, kicked out to O’Neale who swung it to an open Bridges for another 3 before the defense had time to get set.
“Getting that to 14, to 10, that was a really good stretch for us,” Vaughn said. “This game is about confidence, and the momentum and shifts that can happen throughout the course of the game a lot of times leads to you having confidence. That really helped us on the defensive end … and allowed us to get out there in pace and transition out there offensively.”