BACK FROM THE BRINK
Vaughn speech helped turn Net`s season around
ATLANTA — On the morning of Nov. 4 in Washington, Jacque Vaughn stood up before his Nets and spoke, ad hoc but from the heart.
“When we came back as a group, we pledged to each other that it was going to be about basketball and hopefully not let anything interfere — any outside noise interfere with that,” Vaughn said. “And our guys have done an unbelievable job of protecting each other and making this thing about basketball. Our shootaround in Washington was the precipice of that.”
They were on a Grand Canyon, Mount Doom-sized precipice.
Steve Nash had been let go and Vaughn had lost his first game as coach. Kyrie Irving had just been suspended, Ben Simmons was injured and many worried Kevin Durant — who had requested a trade in the offseason — could pull a repeat with the terrible 2-6 start to the regular season.
“Yeah, that was a lot of stuff going on off the court,” Nic Claxton told The Post. “[Vaughn] was just telling us that every day he’s going to be [here], he’s going to bring the best version of himself. And obviously actions speak louder than words, and he’s done that, especially during that time. It was a lot of unknown and a lot of things going on. But we weathered the storm, and here we are.”
Here is having morphed the terrible into terrific. The Nets, who had been 13th in the East, have gone 21-6 to vault to second in the conference.
Irving and Simmons are playing. Well. Durant is smiling. And the Nets are winning, at a better rate than any team in the league since that morning.
“Just knowing what we want to do every time we step on the floor keeps our mind at ease and we have a belief in whatever Jacque tells us,” Durant said.
How? It’s not just one thing. It’s a lot of little things — that all started stacking up that morning in Washington.
“It’s been a combination of things: The combination of us having guys healthy, having Kyrie back 100 percent full time, and us just being comfortable with [Vaughn],” Claxton told The Post. “It’s a combination of all those things, and guys just buying in and going out having fun. It worked out.”
The health and availability are obvious, from Irving being back from an eight-game suspension to Simmons’ return to form. The latter’s net rating in Brooklyn’s NBA-best 10-game win streak is 17.3, third-best in the league of players who had logged at least 140 minutes as of Thursday.
Additionally, the Nets are fostering a focus on basketball and trust; a trust of Vaughn, and of each other. That included a players-only meeting that preceded Vaughn’s shootaround speech.
“What you said about making basketball the main thing,” Markieff Morris told The Post. “We talked about it as a team too, without the coaches. This is our safe haven for basketball. This is where we get away from the outside world, we quiet the noise; because everybody’s got something going on outside of basketball, no matter what it is.
“You might not know whatever it might be for the next person, but everybody’s got something going on. So once we step into the building — whether its practice or a game — let’s put that to the side for three, four hours and just focus on the group and winning basketball games.”
Building that trust has been vital.
“As a group, just sticking together and believing and trusting the process. We had pretty much a new group, a lot of new faces. So for us, it’s really coming together, sticking with it. You’re going to face adversity, we faced it early on. No matter what, everything we faced we just stuck with it,” Edmond Sumner told The Post.
“It’s a collective effort for all of us to really buy into what we have going on here, and that’s the big picture,” Irving said. “As much as we’ve been through here in Brooklyn, the teammate changes, the things we’ve dealt with as an organization, when we have that collective trust of everybody buying into the big picture ... that makes a big difference.”
➤ Brooklyn’s 10game winning streak is not only the longest in the NBA this season, but gave the Nets the second-best record in the league (23-12) entering Thursday . ... It is still unclear if Joe Harris, who had been left home in Brooklyn to rest his sore left knee, will be meeting the team for Friday’s practice here.