BOSTON — Sick of shoveling, plowing and digging out yet?
Yeah, so are the Nets.
Normally, the 5-52 Nets and “digging out” go together with the phrase “double-digit deficit.” But for the players and coaches, this time it meant just what it signaled for the rest of us: digging out of a double-digit snowfall.
“This is pretty brutal,” guard Courtney Lee said. “I’ve been in snow situations all my life, growing up in Indianapolis and then in Kentucky and this was probably the worst. [In Indy], we got snow like this once a year.”
Welcome to New Jersey.
The Nets started practice late yesterday, “just a few minutes,” said interim coach Kiki Vandeweghe whose gang faces the Celtics today (1 p.m.; YES; WFAN-1050 AM). Some players needed to be fetched by team interns because they couldn’t get out of their driveways. One, Keyon Dooling, didn’t have a working car.
“I had a car, but it wouldn’t have made it . . . [Thursday], going home from here, I spun out, hit the curb, flattened my tire, kind of bumped a stop sign,” Dooling said of the excitement he brought to his street in Closter, N.J., where the local police “did a great job” helping him get home.
Dooling said his vehicle, an Infiniti truck, “didn’t handle well. . . . There was some ice I didn’t see and the next thing I know there was a curb and a stop sign.” He blamed his car.
“Somebody has to be accountable. I can’t blame myself,” Dooling said, smiling, “so I’ve got to blame the car.”
Others didn’t have the same excitement.
“I had to wait to get shoveled out because there was snow up to my exhaust pipes,” Josh Boone said.
“Getting here was fine. I have a big truck,” Yi Jianlian said.
Jarvis Hayes (his calf is fine and he’s probable for today) blew through the drifts in a big SUV, but he left extra early and still only made practice by 20 minutes. Hayes is from Atlanta, where the Blizzard of 1994 is legendary, but he claimed this snow was worse, comparing it to the snows he saw playing in Detroit and Washington. He saw snow stacked to the top of the lights in parking lots, just like Detroit.
“This is a lot of snow,” Hayes said.