IN THE LANE

ANOTHER SWEEP: Make it consecutive seasons that Goran Dragic has been swept out of the playoffs, this time with the Nets, after enduring the Heat’s first-round sweep at the hands of the Milwaukee Bucks last year. While he was non-committal about his future in the immediate wake of the Nets’ demise, the veteran guard, who turns 36 on Friday, very much sounds like someone who wants more.“I don’t know. It’s tough to say right now. My head is still hot,” he said in the wake of the Nets’ 4-0 sweep by the Celtics.“I don’t want to make any decisions right now, because I’m sad, I’m pissed. So I just need some time to process this. But I love basketball. I still want to play another two, three years. So we’ll see what’s going to happen.”The determination, he said, remains.“It happened to me last year. I got swept, too,” he said.“So you can take advantage of that as a challenge in the offseason, and just try to have that in your mind, have that chip on your shoulder when you come back.”

NETS PERSPECTIVE: Dragic also offered his thoughts on the Nets coming up short, despite playing alongside Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.“For us, the time that I spent here, every day was something different, something tough, not only for coaches, but for us players, too,” he said, having joined the Nets on Feb. 22, 12 days after the Nets traded Harden and Paul Millsap to the Philadelphia 76ers in exchange for Ben Simmons, Seth

Curry, Andre Drummond and draft picks.“We were just not good enough,” he said.“That’s it. I don’t want to say who was good, who was not. No. As a team, this is a team sport and everybody needs to work as a collective, as a group. We were just not tight as a group, that’s it. On the floor.”

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: After losing to the Heat in the first round, Hawks General Manager Travis Schlenk, the former Heat video coordinator, cited the Heat’s path as a logical comparison to his team losing in last season’s Eastern Conference finals to the Milwaukee Bucks and then this season’s five-game demise.“Miami was in the Finals two years ago; last year they get swept in the first round of the playoffs,” Schlenk said during his season-ending media session in Atlanta.“The NBA, for the most part, is not linear. It’s ups and downs.

Each season has its own life, so to speak. We’re always going to look to improve. This series, Miami is a lot like Milwaukee in a sense. Very physical, big defenders. We saw that last year, a switching defense, those are things we have to continue to work to get better at.”

NO FEAR: Homecourt advantage in the second round of the Eastern Conference playoffs belongs to the two teams willing to take on whatever challenges emerged from the play-in tournament. That had the No. 1-seeded Heat taking out Atlanta in five games and the No. 2 Celtics with their sweep of the Nets. Interestingly, guard

Jaylen Brown said Celtics coach Ime Udoka involved the players in that process.“Ime kind of set the tone from the jump how he felt about it,”Jaylen Brown said in the wake of Boston’s sweep.“But it was pretty cool for a coach to include us as a unit in that decision-making and stuff like that. We all came to the conclusion that, like, ‘Look, man, if we want to do something special, ain’t no shortcuts, ain’t no trying to manipulate or ducking.”

THE BACK STORY: In describing his desire to get back in coaching since his Feb. 21, 2021 dismissal, former Minnesota Timberwolves coach Ryan Saunders reflected on a conversation with Heat coach Erik Spoelstra regarding what coaches miss about coaching.“I had lunch with Erik Spoelstra and he asked that,” Saunders told the Star Tribune amid the Timberwolves’ playoff run.“I said, ‘Believe it or not, it’s camaraderie and the misery.’ And Erik agreed. The camaraderie of the NBA, but also the pain in the stomach — knowing that win or lose, there’s always that next challenge.”