After acquiring Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett in July, the Nets immediately became championship contenders. But after losing their season opener against the Cavaliers, it became clear that Brooklyn’s collection of All-Stars weren’t there quite yet.
If the Nets’ season starts out similar to the Heat’s first year with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh playing together – losing their first game and eight of their first 17 in 2010 – they won’t look like everyone envisioned for some time.
“It takes a whole season to gel. In their situation, we understand what they’re going through with the championship expectations with a brand new team,” Bosh said at the Heat’s Friday morning shootaround in lower Manhattan, prior to the night’s game in Brooklyn. “That’s not always the easiest thing to do. There’s going to be peaks and valleys throughout the whole process. You just have to deal with it and move on.”
Though not as top-heavy as Miami’s acclaimed triumvirate, the Nets’ roster is even deeper than that Heat team — which made the first of three straight NBA Finals appearances that season — with six former all-stars. However, the new teammates have spent little time playing together in the preseason and training camp because of various injuries.
Bringing so many talented players together, Bosh thinks it takes even longer for those new teammates to play alongside each other because it can be so different than what they’re accustomed to.
“It’s a lot more difficult because guys have to have new roles that they’re not used to,” said Bosh. “When you have guys that you can mold a little bit, you can tell them what roles to fill, they can master that coming right off. [If] you have a guy that’s used to scoring 20 [points] a game and you’re asking him to cut his minutes and probably take that down to 14, that’s a huge challenge and something you have to adjust to. Everybody has to buy in. It’s always easy to talk about, it’s never easy to do it.”
After starting that season 9-8, the Heat won 21 of their next 22 games. It looked like everything had finally come together after more than a month of the regular season. It hadn’t.
“In our case, it probably took six weeks before the guys started to feel a little bit more comfortable, [but] even when we went on that run, we still weren’t ready for real adversity that happens,” said Heat coach Eric Spoelstra. “It’s different for each team…it’s impossible to predict.”
The sense around Miami was that the Nets would figure it out, that the veteran-heavy group could be a legitimate threat to their three-peat. And though the teams have no real history against each other, the rivalry the Heat developed playing against Pierce and Garnett in the playoffs will make it feel like the teams have been rivals for years.
“It’s going to be the same because when they were in Boston, they were trying to win championships. They’re with the Nets, they’re trying to win championships,” said Bosh. “It’s always going to be the same sort of intensity every time we play them, especially this year. We know what they feel they have a chance to do and they’re trying to take what we have.”
Heat forward Udonis Haslem said, “There’s no love lost between us and those guys. That’s no secret.”