WASTING AWAY
B'klyn about to squander another precious season of Durant's prime
THREE games deep into this first-round series, it is painfully clear that the Celtics are running an advanced Auerbachian clinic at the Nets’ expense. They have better coaching, better defense, better offense, better chemistry, better balance, better everything.
Maybe the Nets will avoid the sweep, put off the inevitable in Game 4, and send this series back to Boston. Maybe Ben Simmons will even put on a uniform and score a basket or two.
But who cares? The Nets just got hit with a Tyson Fury uppercut in their 109-103 defeat Saturday night at Barclays Center, and are staggering straight toward elimination. No NBA team has ever overcome a 3-0 deficit, and history will not be made over the next week. This has been a complete embarrassment for the Nets, who didn’t put up any more of a fight in Game 3 in Brooklyn than they did in the second half of Game 2 in Boston.
“I just felt like we didn’t have the right spirit throughout the entire game,” said Blake Griffin, who’s been around long enough to know.
The Nets didn’t have the right spirit in their first home game in a playoff series that they trailed 2-0? What an indictment of the way this team is being coached.
“That’s a sh--ty game,” was how Kevin Durant put it.
Nets coach Steve Nash cited Boston’s size and his own team’s fatigue in breaking down the mismatch, saying that Durant was tired from playing too many minutes, and that Kyrie Irving was tired from his Ramadan fasting. Griffin became the second Nets player to confirm publicly that the Celtics are the more cohesive team. Durant criticized himself for “thinking too much, to be honest, this whole series.”
What an unholy mess. Griffin was exhumed by the overmatched Nash in the fourth quarter, and tried his damnedest to bring his team back to life. No way these Celtics were going to get beaten by a 33year-old guy who had yet to play in the series.
With 6:25 to go, Jayson Tatum took a pass on the fast break and scored while getting fouled by Durant. After the ball fell through the net, Durant caught it with his left hand, lowered his head, and fired the ball at the basket stanchion. The Celtics held a 12point lead. Red Auerbach would have lit his cigar right then and there. Some paying customers at Barclays Center could be heard booing in the final minutes — at least when they weren’t drowned out by chanting Celtics fans — and for good reason. The Nets aren’t just blowing a shot at a championship in the opening playoff round. They aren’t just in danger of going none-anddone after talking up the possibilities of winning it all.
They are also one more miserable night away from officially wasting another season of Durant’s prime.
Durant is the best basketball player in the history of New York. He is better than Patrick Ewing, Walt Frazier, and Willis Reed on the Knicks’ side of town, and better than Jason Kidd and Julius Erving on the Nets’ side.
When his career is over, Durant might possibly stand among the 10 greatest NBA players of all time. If nothing else, the top 15 seems like a pretty good bet. Durant is 33, so he still has some real time left to climb the ladder of historical figures in the game. He could end up second on the unofficial all-time small forward scoreboard, ahead of Larry Bird and behind LeBron James.
On the subject of legacy, this much is clear: The rings are the thing. That’s what made Game 3 hurt so damn much. Durant and Irving are healthy this postseason, and who knows when or if that will happen again. The Nets failed their franchise player last spring, not the other way around, and this time around is a bit more complicated. Durant had to accept responsibility for his numbers in Boston: 13-for-41 from the floor, including an 0-10 fourth quarter in Game 2. “It’s on me to just finish it and figure it out,” he’d acknowledged. He didn’t finish it in Game 3, and didn’t figure it out. After believing he’d been too aggressive in the losses in Boston, Durant decided to play off his teammates, to let the action come to him. “We tried to decoy him a little bit,” Irving said. Of course it didn’t work. Durant took just 11 shots and scored just 16 points, not nearly enough on a night when his counterpart, Tatum, scored 39. “Sometimes I end up taking myself out of the game,” Durant said. Of course, it wasn’t all on KD. After an indifferent effort Wednesday night, Irving missed 11 of 17 shots Saturday, including all seven of his 3-point attempts. Nash, a Hall of Famer at the point, once again failed to devise a plan that created the necessary space for Durant against Boston’s suffocating defense. The Nets only needed to win two home games to make this a series, and to apply the kind of pressure on Boston that the Celtics’ defenders had applied in TD Garden. The Nets weren’t tough enough to do it. By their own admission, they didn’t have the requisite spirit in Game 3, just as they didn’t have the requisite intensity in Game 2. Theirs is a colossal failure. The Nets have wasted another shot at a championship, and another year of Kevin Durant’s prime they will never get back.