The Nets play their best basketball with their backs against the wall. That’s why their championship hopes are still alive in what looks like a lost season.
The Nets trailed by 17 points at the half and faced a deficit as large as 21 in the third quarter before turning on the jets to make it a respectable game in the fourth quarter. That’s when Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving shouldered the load to carry their team to a 110-98 win over their cross-town rivals, the Knicks, at the Garden.
The fact their backs were against the wall against a Knicks team seeded 12th in the East without starters Julius Randle, Mitchell Robinson and Derrick Rose is concerning approaching the final two decisive games of the regular season before Tuesday’s play-in tournament.
The Knicks (35-45) are 10 games below-.500. They have become synonymous with blown leads, failed late-game execution and fumbling the bag after a fourth-seeded finish last season. That team built a lead that would have swallowed most.
But the Nets continued to prove they aren’t most teams.
The Knicks aren’t like most teams, either — they’re not like most teams standing in-between the Nets and the Larry O’Brien championship trophy. The road to the NBA Finals will undoubtedly have pit stops in Miami, Milwaukee, Boston or Philadelphia. The Knicks don’t even belong in the same sentence as those teams.
Which makes Wednesday’s result polarizing. The Nets trailed by more than 20, at times looking disinterested in winning a game they needed, before showing up the Knicks on their own floor. Before showing their so-called big brother who’s really the boss in the Big Apple.
There are two ways of viewing the glass, and both are correct: The Nets should have never trailed by that much against such a lesser opponent, but they showed their spine and resolve coming back via a 33-point swing to secure their chances at finishing seventh in the East.
The Nets are one of the hardest teams to read in all of basketball. They run little to no offensive sets. Their effort fluctuates on a daily basis. Their only identifiable actions are “get the ball to Durant or Irving and get out of the way,” or the occasional pick-and-roll, which results in an attempt at the rim, a kick-out to a shooter or, wait for it, the ball back in either Durant or Irving’s hands. Their defense picks and chooses which quarters, sometimes which games, it wants to show.
Yet, when the Nets are playing inspired defense like they were in the second half against the Knicks, the limited offensive play-calling is enough. That’s why you invest more than $300 million in your two superstar scorers.
They can get you a basket when most others can’t. And they can get you a win out of thin air.
What looked like a lost game and a lost season at halftime still looked like a team with at least a puncher’s chance at winning a championship. There is no deficit too big for the Nets to overcome.
Now there’s one more lead to come back from: trailing in the standings as the eighth seed trying to make the NBA Finals.
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Source: Berkshire mont