If you only watched the Nets’ bench during Tuesday’s 111-106 overtime victory over the Wizards, you would have thought it was the opening game of the playoffs as opposed to the opening game of the preseason.
From start to finish, the entire group — no matter who was in the game — was up and cheering for their teammates on the floor, leaping out of their seats and going crazy whenever someone made a basket, drew a charge or blocked a shot.
It was a marked change from the way the team comported itself last season, and one that wasn’t lost on the players.
“It’s better,” Deron Williams said after Tuesday’s game, regarding the Nets’ sideline demeanor. “A lot better. It’s better than it was in the playoffs.
“We’re going to be together this year. We had a lot of stuff going on internally last year. People [ticked] off about not playing … normal stuff, but we’re not letting that happen this year.
“We talked about it, and a big part of team [success] is staying together, cheering for each other. We had some disagreements today, and we squashed them right there, and it was good.”
Since being hired as the team’s head coach in June, Jason Kidd has referred to the team’s placid demeanor last season multiple times, first saying the Nets would get “unplugged” when they reached 89 or 90 points a year ago at his introductory press conference in June, and then said the Nets were a “vanilla” team at his meeting with reporters two weeks ago before training camp.
“It was just vanilla,” Kidd said that day of the team’s identity last season. “I think you guys can see, after the trade with [Kevin] Garnett and [Paul] Pierce that it’s kind of changed. So I think we’re doing the right thing with changing the identity.
“It was just [that] there was no flavor and no identity … with that trade, that changes the whole game.”
No one has ever considered the three players the Nets acquired in their blockbuster trade with the Celtics — Garnett, Pierce and Jason Terry — “vanilla” personalities, and it’s clear their presence already has begun to change the tenor of this team, even just at this stage of the preseason.
“What we want to bring here is, ‘We’re all for each other, and you give yourself up for betterment of this team,’ ” Garnett said after Tuesday’s win. “You root for the next guy as much as he’s rooting for you, and that’s what it is. [If a] guy’s on the ground, we’re picking them up.
“We’re creating something here, so we’re going to continue to carry this over.”
Both Kidd and his players have referenced a players and coaches meeting in Durham, N.C., just prior to the start of training camp, as the beginning of this process, a chance to get everything out in the open and everyone on the same page before the season started.
And when players with the résumés Garnett and Pierce have suggest something, it is hard not to listen.
“The energy is great,” forward Reggie Evans said. “I do appreciate it. We had fun last year, don’t get me wrong, but we just took it up another notch, especially with the players we brought in.
“We’re listening to them … you don’t really have a choice but to listen to guys with the stuff they’ve achieved in the NBA. So it can be contagious and in a very, very great way.”