Blame game
Plenty to go round for skidding Nets
The only thing more baffling than the sudden and stunning collapse the Nets have experienced in the past week and a half is the lack of answers from anyone involved as to what has happened to this team.
“I don’t know,” Joe Johnson said when asked following Wednesday night’s 10498 loss to the Heat. “We just can’t win a game. … That’s pretty much it.”
The Nets’ last win was March 2, over the leagueleading Warriors. That gave them four wins in their first six games after the AllStar break, and seemed to mark a turning point after four mostly down months.
Now, however, it seems as if it was the highwater mark for the Nets, who have dropped five winnable games in a row since, and find themselves quickly losing touch with the four teams in front of them — Indiana, Miami, Charlotte and Boston — for the last two playoff spots in the Eastern Conference playoff race. They will try to right themselves Saturday in Philadelphia against the Sixers.
“Man, it’s hard,” Thaddeus Young said. “It is definitely in our hands and it’s slipping out of our grasp, but we’ve just got to keep going out there and battling, keep going out there and fighting and hopefully the tides will turn and work in our favor.”
There’s plenty of blame to go around. The players obviously take the brunt of it, having begun this skid with a disastrous blowout loss to the Hornets at home on March 4. After that, they squandered a 15point fourthquarter lead against the Suns on March 6, fell apart down the stretch Sunday against the Jazz and were routed after a hot start against the Pelicans on Tuesday. Finally, they quickly fell behind by doubledigits in the first quarter against the Heat.
But some blame has to go to coach Lionel Hollins. He’s the one who has to come up with something to get them going and, at least so far, nothing is working. That doesn’t mean, however, Hollins is going to stop trying.
“No, you keep fighting to the end,” he said. “As long as I’ve got breath, and as long as I’m the coach, I’m going to keep fighting.”
Hollins was asked if he was concerned his players might not share that mentality.
“Not really,” he said. “I think we’ve been fighting. There’s some games we can’t get back, [such as] Charlotte, but we’ve been in most games.”
The Nets may have been in some of the games during the losing streak, but they’re not winning them. That has left a season that not long ago seemed headed for a third straight playoff berth on the verge of going off the rails.
The Nets, unlike their crosstown rival Knicks, don’t control their firstround pick this year — they will have to swap it with the Eastleading Hawks as part of the Joe Johnson trade, meaning they likely will wind up picking 29th or 30th. The only choice they have now is somehow to get things figured out before it’s too late.
“I never would’ve imagined this,” Johnson said. “But you’ve got to keep working.
“I know it’s farfetched that we are still fighting for a playoff spot, but it’s still not over.”