SAFE AT HOME?
Nets' chance to turn around dismal stretch with 10 of next 11 in B'klyn
The Nets opened the second half of their season with their worst loss in years. And matched the worst collapse in a generation.
The Nets blew an 18-point fourth-quarter lead Sunday against the Clippers, surrendering the final 22 points in an embarrassing implosion. It tied the biggest game-ending run on record since play-by-play data was first tracked in 1997-98.
“Very disappointing,” Dennis Smith Jr. said. “Very disappointing. We played a good game. We blew it.”
The Nets blew it, from players to coaches. The players missed nine straight shots with turnovers in that horrid endgame. The coaches didn’t seem to have them prepared for the tactical changes the Clippers made. Simple adjustments left coach Jacque Vaughn’s squad befuddled.
These are the vibes they bring into Tuesday’s clash with their visiting cross-river rival Knicks, who are as hot as the Nets are cold.
“We’ve just got to stay consistent,” Cam Thomas said. “We’ve been on a little rough patch for a little while now.
“When we play how we play, we can compete with anybody. So I probably say we’ve just got to turn up a notch because we’re 17-25. We’ve just got to turn it up a notch and just try to string together some wins, because it’s the halfway point The season’s almost over, so we’ve just got to come up and down and get some wins under our belt.”
The Nets have tumbled headlong out of not only Eastern Conference playoff position but out of the play-in. They’re a game behind Atlanta for the last play-in having dropped 15 of their last 19.
None will be as galling as Sunday’s one, though. Their weaknesses were exposed on the floor and on the sideline, outplayed and outcoached by the Clippers.
“It’s all a part of the journey. It’s not going to be perfect. We’ve been taking some losses, but [this] is just another part of the journey. It’s a tough ‘L’, of course. Everybody in our organization, we hate losing,” Nic Claxton said. “It’s definitely going to leave a bad taste in our mouths. But like I said, we’ve just got to learn from it as a team, as a unit and be ready to go back home and get some wins.”
They’ll have every chance to. But the Nets have to hope that some home cooking can get them out of their funk.
The Nets will tip off a five-game homestand Tuesday and play 10 of their next 11 in the friendly confines of Barclays Center. The one road game won’t require a flight; just a drive down the New Jersey Turnpike in Philadelphia.
This is a golden opportunity. But are they good enough to take advantage of it?
“We’ve got a big homestand coming up and things are definitely trending in the right direction; even [Sunday] we played well for the majority of the game, but obviously we have to play that same way for 48 minutes,” Claxton said. “And that’s our challenge.”
The Nets have a host of challenges. As soon as the Clippers went small and started switching, the Nets lost all semblance of ball movement or pace. Worse, they looked shocked by tactics that are far from shocking.
“Yeah, we’ve just got to know when to adjust, how to adjust; and just got to play the game. The whole game,” Mikal Bridges said.
“[The Clippers] went small, redded everything. Then we were stuck, didn’t know what to do with ... how to break it.”
Granted, the Knicks are less likely to deploy smaller lineups Tuesday; but that’s hardly the point. It’s a damning indictment that the Nets are starting the second half of the season and — despite two timeouts and a veteran team — they had 5 ½ minutes to adjust to the adjustment and were completely befuddled.
The Nets were a switching team all last season. They redded frequently the year before that, and have been using small lineups essentially since Vaughn took over. The concepts are simple and familiar.
Yet all season long they’ve failed to figure out how to handle them.
“Switching has been somewhat of a kryptonite for us,” Claxton admitted. “It’s definitely hurt us this far in the season. It just forced us to play slow and [hunt] mismatches instead of keeping that flow we had going offensively.”