Yes, even in the sparkling new Barclays Center, there was plenty of dust flittering about Tuesday night. There will be plenty more on Thursday. Throat lumps and goose bumps and all manner of sentiment were coursing through the veins of the CeltNets, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. With more to come.
Tuesday, it was the Celtics. Thursday it will be Doc Rivers. Reunion Week at Barclays. Part one was a splendid chapter, the Nets playing their best end-to-end game of the year, beating the C’s 104-96, giving the CeltNets the win in their first meeting against the team for whom they lifted a 17th banner.
Thursday it’s Rivers who, if he’d had his way, would’ve conducted this reunion 3,000 miles away, in Los Angeles, the three of them making like an old vaudeville act, trying to make one last championship go of things alongside Chris Paul and Blake Griffin.
Touching stuff, all of it.
For the Nets, though, it wasn’t nearly their most interesting or important reunion of the week: the one between Deron Williams and his teammates, between Williams and Nets fans, between Williams and the course these Nets want to set before things blew too far adrift. That’s the big one. And, after the band has been back together for 48 minutes, a feel-good one, too.
“Watching these games, I knew we’d been a little stagnant at times,” Williams said after contributing 25 points (thanks to highly efficient 10-for-16 from the floor) and seven assists to this victory, his first after missing nine straight games with a bum ankle. “We needed to pick up the tempo and the pace. And I wanted to get us going early.”
It was precisely the kind of performance Williams has hinted at throughout his time with the Nets, Jersey side and Brooklyn side, the kind he has teased us with for small swatches and longer stretches but rarely for any meaningful kind of run. Last February, when the Nets made a final push at the Knicks atop the Atlantic, he played like this.
And then he didn’t.
And the difference is stark and telling.
“This,” he said, “is kind of my job.”
It is Williams, more than anyone, who will determine the expectation level this team merits. There were a lot of 50- and 54- and 59-win predictions for the Nets, and much of that was based on Williams being the glue, the conductor, rising to the level he used to regularly attain in Utah because, armed with running mates that would satisfy his ambitions and draw out his talents.
And also being reasonably healthy.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way, mostly because his ankle hasn’t allowed it to. And it wasn’t as if the Nets were taking anyone’s breath away even when Williams was on the floor (even with the win, they’re still only 4-6 with Williams in the lineup). But Tuesday felt different. Is it a new beginning? It only is if they back this up with another professional effort Thursday against Rivers and the Clippers.
Still, it was hard not to see a difference not only in what the Nets did against the Celtics, but in what they believed they were capable of doing against them. That’s what an elite point guard does. He injects confidence in his teammates as if he were distributing Vitamin B-12 shots.
“I mean, he’s D-Will,” said Brook Lopez, who hit on 10 of his 13 shots and seemed right in sync with Williams right from the start. “It’s so simple. It’s tough to quantify and to put into words but the energy he gives us out there, the composure, the leadership? And other teams have to respect him, too.”
Said Garnett: “He makes a huge difference.”
He did Tuesday night and he will going forward, assuming he is able to maintain this level, assuming his ankle doesn’t betray him another time or three, assuming that when the competition stiffens he’ll be equal to it. The Celtics are a feisty team, and given the way they obliterated the Knicks two days earlier, it was easy to misdiagnose them as a terrific team. They are flawed.
But, then, so have the Nets been flawed, and broken, and lost, and it’s funny how the arrival of a star playing like a star can alter the way all of that looks.