Beat Hornets without Kyrie

Can the Nets hold on to a lead? It’s been the question this team has had to answer every time they’ve built a double-digit advantage this season. And it’s a question they had to answer again after building a sizable lead against the Hornets on Wednesday night.

The Nets were up by as much as 11 in the third quarter, but the Hornets rallied back to cut the deficit to just three with 6:28 to go in the fourth quarter.

Oh, man. Oh, man. Not again.

Not again is right. Instead of caving, the Nets limited the Hornets to just eight more points for the rest of the quarter. Without Kyrie

Irving (right shoulder impingement) and Caris LeVert (thumb surgery), the team held on for a 101-91 win against a budding, young team that had won two of their last three games.

“We have to take advantage of our leads,” DeAndre Jordan said. “We’ve gotta try to have a cutthroat mentality when it comes to that and take care of the basketball, make the right decisions on offense and defense. Play our defense and play the game, don’t play the score.”

The stars seemed to align against the Nets on Wednesday

night when they went the first six-and-a-half minutes of the fourth quarter without a field goal. It looked like the Hornets, who had crept back into it, were going to run the table and run out of Barclays Center with the win.

But in past games when the Nets blew a lead, their defense would also end up out of whack, allowing teams to run away with a lead of their own.

“I thought that, as opposed to some other games, we didn’t let the misses affect our spirit or our morale or our will to get stops on the defensive end,” head coach Kenny Atkinson said. “I like the way we defended despite missing a lot of shots.”

That was until Taurean Prince hit a step-back three that prompted Hornets head coach James Borrego to call a timeout. The floodgates opened for the Nets from there, as they built their lead back up to 12 with 1:33 left in the fourth quarter.

“That was a huge shot up three, the game’s kind of teetering,” said Atkinson, who called Prince an X-factor for Wednesday’s victory. “Made shots help your morale, too.”

The win, despite coming against a team projected to sit at the bottom of the standings at the end of the season, is somewhat significant.

The Nets built a 16-point lead earlier this season