There are such nights for every team with a mustache of championship ambition, evenings when the most basic of all competitive elements are displayed. The Nets have been looking disruptive lately. They seemed disinterested. It’s a long season. Spasms of poor basketball are inevitable. But if you are equal to your reputation, those things must pass.
They lost three games in a row and they looked pretty horrible with it. They were losing a terrible loss in Detroit to a Pistons team, and it looks like it’s been playing some nights already. They were the worst kind of frontrunners: at the top of their game against amazing teams, which had lowered themselves to the lowered level of fewer teams.
That was the message Steve Nash had for his players before they beat the Pacers in their final game Wednesday night at Barclays Center before heading west for a terribly interesting five-game trip:
“You can’t play the way you play.”
So the Nets had fun on Wednesday night, certainly for a first half in which they not only bumped the Pacers, but also scraped any trace of imagination out of the game. There was a 32-5 run that ended the half that really didn’t end until two minutes had passed in the third quarter, the expansion expanded to 39-8 and the score was ridiculously 69-33.
You play so well for a long period of time, it almost does not matter that the Nets sit on a deck chair most of the second half so the Pacers could outsmart them the rest of the way 61-35. A win is a win. This one was 104-94. This one made them feel much better about themselves in their cheerful way.
And by the time they get through San Francisco, Sacramento, Phoenix and Los Angeles (for an interesting move with both the Lakers and the Clippers), they will be reunited with Kevin Durant, they will be whole and they can the work goes on to maximize their pleasure.
“You could see from the beginning that they were locked up,” Nash said, “and when they were locked up, you could see what they were capable of.”
It certainly helped that the Pacers played the first half like a team presented to each other during the opening spring ball, but the Nets, who lacked Durant, and who did not necessarily receive A-plus offensive attempts the other two-thirds of their awesome troika, Kyrie Irving and James Harden (although they combined together, it was an amazing 27-for-27 from the line).
No, during the piece that turned the game around, they played like they always play when the times are good: with an effortless smoothness that excites the basketball surfer in everyone. Even without Durant, there are so many basketball skills on display when things are rolling, this is probably what makes it twice as furious when things go the other way around.
The Nets, of course, got some rest. One of them is, of course: the long length of the NBA season, even one that is cut short by ten games, will give them plenty of time to figure things out. There are only less than two-thirds of a season left.
The other is a little more surprising: despite the Nets’ 15-12 pedestrian record, they are still firmly in third place in an Eastern Conference, where only the 76ers (18-7) and Bucks (16- 8 Wednesday’s game in the Suns) jumped to the better start than the average start of the season.
“The communication was there, the effort was there, we didn’t play such a defense all season,” Joe Harris said. “It’s definitely good to see us take a step in the right direction.”
The Nets understand this all well, of course. They know how much research they are undergoing and apparently welcome it, even if it means admitting their shortcomings regularly. Jeff Green chatted with his teammates after Tuesday’s mess in the Motor City, and while it may not have been a full-fledged come-to-Jesus sermon, it got on a general nerve: A good team that doesn’t play well , is a heartbreaking thing to watch.
But someone who does?
Wednesday night we saw what it looked like. Choose your adjective: exciting, breathtaking, exciting. While the Nets take their show on the road, they hope to be able to add a few more to the stack, and not the other one, which includes: Frustrating. Confusing. Exciting.