HOUSTON — You can’t blame one man. Blaming one man for this is like faulting one blown light bulb for the Blackout of 1965. Blaming one man for this is like censuring one misguided fellow in sequins for the Disco Era. Blaming one man for this is like pointing the finger at one slowpoke in an AMC Pacer for the backup on the Belt Parkway.
The Nets are a basketball calamity of the highest order, co-authors of a New York basketball season in desperate need of that most New York of sporting creations, the do-over.
“We’re not just losing,” Nets guard Tyshaun Taylor said of his team, though he could well have been speaking for the Knicks as well. “We’re getting killed.”
Together, the teams have transformed the most common mantras of their buildings from “Lets go, Knicks!” and “Brooooook-lyyyyyynnnnn!” to something a little less catchy:
“If we can only get the deficit under 15/10/5 by the end of the quarter/half/final TV timeout, we can still do this …”
Nets coach Jason Kidd doesn’t have to sit on his hands and hope. He has power, even if he felt powerless as the Rockets turned a basketball game into a track meet Friday night, toying with the Nets as they plastered them 114-95.
Nineteen sounds like a disgraceful margin. But at the half, the Nets were on pace to lose by 52. It was 66-40, and Kidd had seen enough. He announced the starters for the second half. Only one of them, Brook Lopez, had started the game. To the other starters, he offered warm-up suits and a cool, cold assurance.
“We’ll see how it goes.”
The view was only slightly better, but at least everyone in black broke a sweat. That’s a start. It’s pathetic, sure. But it is a start.
“A lot of guys are frustrated,” said Andray Blatche, one of the exiled. “A lot of guys are embarrassed.”
Said Lopez, who scored 16 points and looked terrific after a seven-game absence with a bum ankle: “We got in this together. And the only way out is to stay in it together.”
Nice sentiment. But Kidd had clearly reached a breaking point watching Houston hammer his team, even though James Harden took exactly two shots across those first 24 minutes. Close to $70 million worth of starter-level talent was absent as a result.
One, Deron Williams, was back home, nursing his perennially balky ankle, and another, Kevin Garnett, was enjoying a “rest” day on this first game of a back-to-back. Paul Pierce, Blatche, Shaun Livingston and Joe Johnson, however, were on the court for the start of the game. And they were, mostly, horrific, the four of them combining to shoot 3-for-23 and only occasionally looking fully engaged.
So Kidd went about as old-school as a coach can get: He pulled a Norman Dale. He benched his starters. He let Lopez get some more work before mercifully giving him the rest of the night off, the lone example of rest as a reward and not retribution, and it was merited.
What will sadly be overlooked because of how wretched everything else turned out was Lopez tried to send his own message to his teammates, opted to come back with Dwight Howard awaiting him, wanted to inject a positive burst into this listless, lifeless team.
He might as well have played this game the way The King & His Court used to play those barnstorming softball games every summer: 1-on-5.
So instead, it was Kidd’s turn to deliver a stinging memorandum of his own. It will take a bit to know if the impact were real, but Johnson, for one, looked plenty angry, all but spitting out: “He’s the coach. I’m the player,” when asked his thoughts on the lineup switch.
As Kidd is discovering, there are no simple solutions to the puzzling craft of coaching. As a player, the soda-cup trick would have earned him a string of salutes from knowing colleagues; as a coach it draws a fifty-large fine. As a player, you can lead by getting in teammates’ grills, by playing hard, by cajoling.
Coaxing, it turns out, is far easier than coaching.
Maybe this was a start, his first true line in the sand. When the Nets took the floor to start the second half, there were tens of millions of dollars’ worth of talent absent for various reasons.
“My team is on the floor,” Kidd said.