Nets can’t hang with Mavs in OT
With the crowd chanting, “Where’s Deron Williams?” — robbed of the chance to boo the Nets’ former player in his return to Brooklyn — it was his replacement, J.J. Barea, and evergreen Dirk Nowitzki who did in the Nets.
The Nets showed toughness and fight but could not stop Barea or Nowitzki, and in a tug of war, they were left emptyhanded after a crushing 119118 overtime loss to Dallas.
Barea stood in for Williams, who was out with a hamstring injury suffered Tuesday, and scored a careerhigh 32 points, including 5of7 from 3point range. Nowitzki had 22 points to pass Shaquille O’Neal for sixth on the NBA’s alltime scoring list, and he also hit the eventual gamewinner, a dunkunder move with 19.2 seconds to play.
Jarrett Jack had one last chance with 3.6 left, but his 18foot fadeaway off a pick and roll clanked off the rim.
“I thought I got a pretty good shot at it. It just [went off the rim],” said Jack, who had 13 points and eight assists. “[It was] a roller coaster. Guys came out and responded in the second half to what they did in the first half … [The Mavericks] fought hard. They weathered the storm, punch after punch. They just had one more punch than we did.”
In fighting back from 16 points down, the Nets (821) showed a lot of the same fight they had in Monday’s bounceback win in Chicago.
Thaddeus Young, who scored a teamhigh 29 points and did yeoman’s work guarding Nowitzki, and Joe Johnson sparked a 3417 third quarter. But in the end, it wasn’t enough — a moral victory, a Pyrrhic one, the kind of pseudovictory losing teams have to substitute for real wins.
“There are no moral victories in the league, just wins and losses. We’re definitely taking an ‘L,’ but there’s some good things we can pull from the game,” Young said. “We’ve just got to win basketball games and bring the intensity that we had in the last two games to the next game and carry it over. We keep playing like we’ve been playing, [and] we’re going to win more games.”
Oddly enough, Bojan Bogdanovic was persona non grata late. He had 17 points, was a plus16 and hit a seasonhigh 5for5 from 3point range but didn’t play in overtime and logged just 1:16 in the fourth.
Lionel Hollins called the move a “coach’s decision.”
“Honestly, that’s the coach’s decision. The guys on the court did a great job. So did that lineup to close the game to get a win,” Hollins said. “I don’t have any problem with that coach’s decision. … They played most of the game with two point guards. We closed the game with [Shane Larkin] and Jarrett.”