This week can make or break Nets' season
The Nets' Royce O'Neale gestures after shooting a three-pointer during the first half of the team's NBA game against the Kings on Thursday at Barclays Center. Credit: AP/Frank Franklin II
The Kyrie Irving drama, the coaching change, the injuries, that horrible feeling of being abandoned by Irving and Kevin Durant . . . There’s no doubt it’s going to take a long time for Nets fans to put this season in the rearview mirror.
Still, if the Nets can hold it together down the stretch – if they can pull off some big wins over the next seven days – it will be a lot easier for fans to believe that they have a solid core heading into the future.
Yes, that’s a lot of pressure to put into one week. Yet, for this current Nets team, it really is a week like no other as Sunday’s game against Denver opens a brutal four-game stretch that also includes two consecutive games at home against Cleveland and a game Saturday in Miami.
Whether or not the Nets (39-31) make the playoffs could be very well determined by next Sunday.
“Hey, look, we all know the math and see the seeding,” said Spencer Dinwiddie when asked about the importance of the upcoming week. “….We understand what it means to play playoff teams, so we’re approaching it with that level of focus.”
The Nets (39-31) enter the Denver game in the sixth and final playoff spot, two games behind the Knicks who defeated the Nuggets on Saturday and 4 ½ games behind fourth-place Cavaliers. Perhaps more importantly, they had just a 1 ½ game lead over the seventh-place Heat entering Saturday night’s play.
If the Nets fall to seventh place they would have to compete in the play-in tournament where the winners advance to the seventh and eighth seed and the losers are eliminated.
Nets coach Jacque Vaughn joked that the first thing he told himself when he woke up Saturday morning that he had to convince his team not to look too far down the road.
“I really want them to focus on our next game, which is Denver, and let that be everything that consumes them. Because it’s enough already,” he said. “That team is good enough that we’ll have enough problems to deal with, so we don’t want to exacerbate it by putting more pressure, anything more on top of it besides the game.”
“He’s a big dude”
The Barclays Center was in the process of being built when Moses Brown’s family moved to Hollis, Queens, and he remembers the excitement he felt every time his family drove by.
“I grew up a Nets fan,” Brown, who signed a 10-day contract with the Nets on Friday, said after practice Saturday. “I had posters of Jason Kidd and a lot of Nets…..I think the Barclays Center was finished when I was 11 years old.”
The 7-2 Brown, who played at Archbishop Malloy and UCLA, spent his first season with the Trail Blazers Since then, he has bounced around to the Thunder, Magic, Cavaliers, Mavericks and Clippers.
After appearing in 34 games with the Clippers this year, the 23-year-old was signed by the Knicks but never played for them. As the tallest player on the Nets, he could quickly log some quality time as a much-needed backup for center Nic Claxton.
“He’s a big dude,” Vaughn said. “I’m gonna see how the games present themselves, (but) we do want to see hm get some quality minutes at some point.”
New strategy for Jokic?
Despite having the best record in the West, Denver enters the Barclays Center having lost five of their last six games, including 122-120 loss to the Nets on March 12.
In that game, the Nets basically forced MVP frontrunner Nikola Jokic to carry the team offensively while they took away most his help. The strategy worked as Kokic finished with 35 point, 20 rebounds and 11 assists, but the Nuggets gave up a 22-point lead.
Vaughn would not say whether the team was looking to employ the same strategy.
““We always talk about you have to have a formula or strategy going into the game,” Vaughn said. “I told the guys yesterday: Some dudes they get up to the plate and you don’t pitch to them, so we’ve gotta have a strategy of who we’re gonna pitch to, and that game, we said we were gonna let Jokic do what he was doing and see if we can have a compromise with the other guy, so we’ll see if that formula is the same for us.”
NET-CETRA
Ben Simmons has changed agents, leaving Rich Paul and Klutch ports for. Bernie Lee and Thread Sports Management, according to reports by ESPN and The Athletic. Paul is the agent who negotiated Simmons’ $177 million, five-year deal with the 76ers in 2019. Simmons’ career has since taken a nose dive as he has struggled with injuries and mental health issues that caused him to miss all of last season and miss 28 games this season……Dinwiddie said the only time he has argued about officiating with officials after a game is when they involve technical fouls that he thinks he didn’t deserve. Apparently, he’s had some success. “I do argue my techs often times and get my money back, because most of the time I don’t get them for super legitimate reasons…..If I’m not cussing someone out or showing them up, I get my money back.”
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
