They earned the record on merit, at least.
If you are a bad basketball team — and the Nets now are, officially, historically bad — you might as well be at your very worst when it matters most, and it is entirely possible that in the whole history of the Nets, they never looked as bad as they did during the second quarter of last nights 117-101 loss to the Mavericks.
And when you consider the whole history of the Nets and all the bad basketball that encompasses, well, that’s saying plenty.
“I wish I had a word to describe what I feel right now, said Devin Harris, the best player on pro basketball’s worst team. “But I don’t.”
Tom Barrise did. It is likely that Barrise will get two games total as an NBA coach to show for 13 years as a loyal organizational soldier and more than a quarter century as a basketball lifer, and in the first he guided the Nets to the loss that tied the league’s worst start at 0-17, and in the second he saw them claim the record for their own.
And when that stint was over, as he prepared to hand the keys to this jalopy over to Kiki Vandeweghe (who will now honor his Isiah Scholarship by coaching the mess he helped assemble), this is what Barrise had to say about that second quarter, in which the Mavs outscored the Nets 49-22, in which they had 24 possessions and scored on 22 of them, in which they shot a Villanova-1985-level 89.5 percent from the floor (closing a half in which they missed only seven of 36 shots):
“Sometimes its about hustle. It’s about getting your knees dirty, getting into a stance and guarding somebody.”
Yep. That sums it up nicely. Throughout this 0-18 purge, there have been a lot of people who have tried to qualify the Nets’ awfulness: They’ve played with a short bench. Injuries have killed them. They played hard every night (which is supposed to be a job requirement, not revelation). But you know what? They are still 0-for-the-season. They’ve still gotten a coach fired. And they now own a record that goes on their permanent record.
Do you know how hard it is to lose 18 straight games in the NBA? All you had to do was look at what happened across the river Tuesday night, the Knicks blasting the Suns out of the Garden, one of the least of the East clobbering the best in the West. In a league where even the best teams no-show now and again, its almost as hard to lose 18 straight as it is to win 18 straight.
“We respect every opponent,” was the diplomatic assessment of Dallas coach Rick Carlisle, which sounds like a distant cousin of one buddy describing a girl to another buddy: “She has a great personality.”
What made all of this perfect, of course, was the presence of Jason Kidd on the floor last night, turning in a vintage Kidd stat line: 16 points, 10 assists, eight rebounds. As impossible as it may be to believe, the Nets are just six years removed from back-to-back appearances in the Finals made possible by Kidd’s singular genius. Six years to plummet from peak to pits.
“I think you could see the dominoes start to go the other way,” Kidd had said in the morning, on the floor of the Dodge Physical Fitness Center at Columbia University, a skip pass south of Grant’s Tomb.
Soon enough, he would visit another kind of mausoleum, a temporary holding cell called Izod Center, where even the promise of history wasn’t enough to draw more than 11,689 people to watch a team already scrawling “Brooklyn” on its boxes of belongings. Even most loyal Nets fans had the good sense to stay home and watch “Modern Family.”
“We couldn’t ever get anybody to come to the games, either,” Kidd said with a chuckle, laughing with the Nets. It wouldn’t be long before he would be laughing at them. History can be funnier than “Family Guy” when it’s happening to somebody else.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com