It was Brooklyn’s big man — not its backcourt — who carried the Nets home last night.
Brook Lopez finished with 26 points, including 16 in the second half, to lift the Nets to an 86-76 win over the Clippers in front of a loud sellout crowd of 17,732 at Barclays Center.
“That’s big,” Gerald Wallace of the performance from Lopez. “He’s getting better every game for us. He’s getting more aggressive and he’s pride in it, and that’s what we need.
“Like we told him, there’s going to be nights where he’s going to be the biggest guy on the court, the most dominant guy on the court, and we’re going to need him to come out and establish himself out on the court and make his presence felt, and I think he did a great job of that.”
No baskets were bigger for Lopez than the back-to-back driving layups he made with 3:32 and 3:03 remaining in the fourth, pushing what was a one-point lead to five, at 79-74, and jumpstarting what turned into a 12-0 run that sealed the win for the Nets (7-4), and allowing them to snap a two-game losing skid.
“My guys are giving me good looks around the basket where I can take one dribble and go up and dunk,” said Lopez, who shot 13-for-24 from the field. “I am getting a lot of easy looks thanks to them.”
The Nets put themselves in position to make that run late in the game with the first good third quarter they have put together in quite some time. After repeatedly struggling to get going in the second halves of games all season long, the switch flipped for the Nets last night at both ends of the floor against the Clippers, turning a 47-40 halftime deficit into a 63-all tie going into the fourth.
Thanks in part to getting Lopez the ball, the Nets were able to establish a better offensive rhythm early in the second half than the often have this season. But, even more importantly, the Nets played shutdown defense — something they have rarely shown they have the capacity to do.
The Nets forced the Clippers into one turnover after another, including eight in the fourth quarter alone, and held them to 10-for-33 shooting from the field overall, including 1-for-8 from 3-point range.
“We definitely played well defensively, especially in the second half,” said Deron Williams, who finished with 11 points and eight assists and is now 14-4 lifetime against his good friend Chris Paul. “We were really active. … We had a game plan on certain guys, and we stuck to that and made it tough for a lot of their guys to get going.”
That included Paul, who finished the game with 14 points and nine assists.
“We just didn’t make shots,” Paul said. “In the second half we had too many turnovers, and missed a lot of open shots. We just got stagnant.”
The Nets also were effective at taking away the “Lob City” aspect of the Clippers’ high-flying offensive attack. After DeAndre Jordan, in particular, had a huge first half with several dunks, the Nets managed to keep Jordan and Blake Griffin at bay in the second.
Much of the credit for that goes to Reggie Evans, their former teammate. Evans was all over the place in the second half, helping to draw technical fouls on both Jordan and Ryan Hollins in the third quarter, finishing with 12 rebounds — including 10 in the second half alone — and generally doing everything he could to drive the Clippers crazy.
“I played with them,” said Evans, who spent last year in Los Angeles. “I kind of know what they like and dislike. … I know when they get frustrated, I know when players may want the ball and aren’t getting it, stuff like that.
“The first half, I felt like I got pushed around,” Evans said. “In the second half, I just kind of tuned everything out at halftime and I just didn’t want to go out like that.”