MIAMI — Last season, the Heat had little trouble taking down the Nets in their three regular season meetings.
This year, though, Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said he expects the Nets to give the two-time defending champions a much stiffer test.
“Yeah,” Spoelstra said when that question was posed to him Friday morning, with a look that made it obvious his answer didn’t require much thought. “Yeah.”
All three meetings between the two teams last season had a similar theme. The Heat seemingly would be on autopilot early on, allowing the Nets to hang around for at least half of each game. Then, at some point in the third quarter, Miami would flip a switch and proceed to take control, quickly putting themselves out of the Nets’ reach.
It was clear how big the gap between the two teams was, and that the Nets would have to do something big if they were going to become a realistic challenger to the Heat anytime soon. Then, this past offseason, Nets general manager Billy King brought in Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Jason Terry and Andrei Kirilenko to bolster the team’s talent, and hired Jason Kidd to become the team’s coach.
All of those moves were endorsed by Spoelstra, who said the addition of Kidd — despite his lack of coaching experience — will make a big difference.
“The thing about that group is you have great leadership with Jason Kidd,” Spoelstra said. “He’s done that his whole life, is bring groups together and get them going to a common goal. He’s brilliant in that regard, and why that’s a great fit.
“Then you have veteran players that understand what this is about, and not having the luxury to wait. They have, at least from the outside, the veteran leadership that can make that work.”
The Nets will get their first chance to prove things are different when they host Miami next Friday in their home opener in Brooklyn, but they already showed there was a different tone this season when these two teams first met last week and Pierce body-checked James on a fastbreak to prevent a layup.
Still, few people have a better understanding of what the Nets are about to go through — trying to meld so many new, high-profile pieces together on the fly — better than Spoelstra and his players, who have spent the past three-plus years living in the middle of a maelstrom after LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh decided to join forces in South Florida in the summer of 2010.
The Nets haven’t gotten a chance to see their full compliment of players on the floor together so far. Deron Williams made his preseason debut Friday night after spending the last few weeks rehabbing a sprained right ankle, while Andrei Kirilenko has missed the past five games with back spasms. Those developments are likely to make what already was expected to be a feeling-out process a longer one.
But Spoelstra said there is no way to simulate going through that experience — and speeding up the familiarization process with one another — besides taking the time to go through it.
“Looking back on it, there were a lot of moments where you look back and kick yourself for not predicting, or not anticipating and being able to figure it out before it happened,” he said. “But the inevitability of it was that we had to go through it together.
“There was no team like it that any of us could compare to. It’s a very unique group — not only personality, previous success, but in terms of their skill sets, and being able to mesh that and make it work.”