Nets coach Avery Johnson likes to break an NBA season down into 10-game segments.
With the Nets now 10 games into their inaugural season in Brooklyn, Johnson sees the first segment as a mixed bag.
“I think we’ve made some progress,” Johnson said following Wednesday’s 102-93 loss to the Warriors in Oakland, which dropped the Nets to 6-4 on the season.
“Some good, some bad, but for a team that hadn’t been together … we’re not celebrating 6-4, but at this point we’ll take it, and hopefully in our next 10 games we will improve on our record in this 10-game stretch.”
It’s been an up-and-down first 10 games for the Nets, who will return to the court tonight to take on the Clippers at Barclays Center. A team with nine new players, and three more who played 16 or less games with the Nets last season, has spent the first few weeks of the season in a feeling-out period, as the players and coaches all get used to one another.
One of those still trying to find his place with his new team is Joe Johnson, one half of “Brooklyn’s Backcourt.” Johnson was brought in this summer to pair with point guard Deron Williams to give the Nets one of the best backcourts in the NBA, but both have played below expectations.
Williams is averaging 17.5 points and 8.2 assists, but is shooting 41.4 percent from the field and just 26.8 percent from 3-point range. Meanwhile, Johnson is scoring 14.9 points per game and shooting 36.4 percent from the field — both far below his career averages.
“We’re not bad, man,” Joe Johnson said. “We’ve had some good stretches, but obviously we still have some things that we need to work on, and that’s just being on the same page on both ends of the floor, especially defensively.
“Offensively that’s the least of our worries at this point, but our defense has to be our staple.”
Team defense was expected to be an issue, and so far it has played out that way. The Nets enter tonight’s action with the 23rd-ranked defense in the league, in terms of points per possession, allowing nearly 104 points per 100 possessions.
The offense, on the other hand, has lived up to the lofty billing it was given. Even with the struggles both Williams and Johnson have had at times, the Nets have still been one of the best offenses in the league. They currently rank sixth overall, scoring just over 105 points per 100 possessions.
A lot of that production has come from center Brook Lopez, who has played well in the early going after sitting out virtually all of last season with a pair of foot injuries.
Lopez has scored over 20 points in five of his last six games, and has blocked at least three shots in six of his last seven games. He’s averaging a team-high 18.7 points and 2.5 blocks, the latter good for a tie for fifth in the NBA.
But after back-to-back losses to the Lakers and Warriors, the Nets hope to get things back on track against the Clippers, as the Nets continue a stretch of eight out of 10 games against teams with winning records.
“We had a good stretch, but we didn’t play many playoff teams, and we just lost the last two,” Williams said. “[Coach] breaks it down like that, [but] I think we’re just struggling right now.
“We have a two-game losing streak, so we have to fight our way out of that.”
tbontemps@nypost.com