Where’s the fire?
Lack of fight worrying trend from Brooklyn
THE NETS aren’t tanking and don’t plan on tearing it down. That means they’d better be competing and fighting, and doing a better job of both than they have over the past couple of weeks.
Monday’s 96-88 win at shorthanded Toronto was at least a start.
“We have to have competitive stamina,” interim head coach Kevin Ollie admitted. “I talked to them about that: How’s your stamina? Not just your wind, I mean just from a competitive standpoint. That has to be there every single minute for us to win, and it wasn’t [lately].
“When somebody hits you, you just don’t lay down, you hit ’em back.”
With the size-starved Nets, physicality doesn’t mean matching strength foot-pound per footpound. It means cutting backdoor, making crisp passes, protecting the ball.
And competitive stamina doesn’t mean running on the treadmill or doing mile repeats at altitude. It means the mental toughness to play good team basketball even in a pressurized fourth quarter, something they haven’t done.
Or to play winning basketball down the stretch. Something they haven’t even come close to doing.
Their competitive gas tank has seemed to be on fumes. For a team that is neither tanking nor rebuilding from scratch, that’s worrisome.
“It’s just the stamina to keep doing it for the whole 48. That’s what it is, just the concentration and the mental aspect of just staying with it,” said Mikal Bridges.
“I know what they have inside and I know what we have in that locker room,” Ollie said after the win. “When they play together and [with] collective spirit, we can win. We can win games. I just always want them to understand that. That’s why I’m so passionate a lot of times.”
The Nets showed a little of Ollie’s passion.
They snapped a season-worst six-game losing skid on Monday. They came in 5 ½ games behind Atlanta for the last Eastern Conference play-in spot and didn’t make up any ground thanks to the Hawks’ rally from a 30-point deficit against Boston.
“You can’t complain about it. You can’t say I wish we could have done this and that. You’re in it right now. So you’re present right now,” Bridges said. “So obviously it sucks that we’re here right now with that situation. But all you can do is you’ve just got to go up from here.”
But as Nets fans know all too well, things don’t necessarily go up. And they can always get worse.
The Brooklyn faithful have had their faith tested, at their most negative ebb in memory.
Many were vexed over The Post’s reports that the team would refuse Houston’s offer of several of their own first-rounders for Bridges. Now many are apoplectic over The Athletic and Yahoo! Sports each claiming Jalen Green had been part of that package.
For better or worse, this Brooklyn roster is likely going to look similar at the start of next season; that means these players need to show some pride in fighting to the finish of this one.
“We gotta learn something, everybody,” Nic Claxton said. “We all just have to look ourselves in the mirror, figure out ways to be better.”
And the thing is, they still have a chance to get something out of this horrible campaign.
Yes, their Tragic Number — the combinations of Nets losses and Hawks wins that would eliminate them from the play-in — is now six after Atlanta’s comeback. But the Nets can’t worry about that. They can only worry about themselves, and about showing some heart.
They finally displayed some against the Raptors.
Brooklyn has the third-easiest schedule down the stretch, per Tankathon. And a year ago at this time the Nets were mired in a five-game losing skid before thrashing Miami 129-100 to win six of their last nine.
Do they have that kind of finish in them? Do they have enough competitive stamina left for that?
Toronto was a start.