NBA

Let’s be Frank: Nets ripped by Nuggets

Lawrence Frank may not have been on the bench Tuesday night, but the Nets sure didn’t look any different.

After Jason Kidd announced his assistant, and former head coach, had been reassigned and would no longer be around the team on daily basis, the Nets went out and got bludgeoned, 111-87, by the Nuggets at Barclays Center.

“They just seemed to put a run together,” Kevin Garnett said, “that didn’t get answered.”

In typical Nets fashion, that Nuggets (11-6) run came in the third quarter, when opponents have decimated the Nets (5-13) all season. Inside the team’s locker room, someone had scrawled on the wall a series of facts: 8:36, the time remaining in the third quarter, 60-56 Nuggets, the score at the time, and 20-4, the run the Nuggets then went on to put the game easily out of reach.

“In the third quarter, it’s a four-point game with eight minutes and some change,” Kidd said. “We can’t score, Denver continues to keep playing, they can’t score … [then] they get a couple rebounds, put-backs and, from there, it just went quickly onto a 20-4 run.

“When you look at what happened in Memphis [Saturday night, a game the Nets won], it’s a one-point game [in the fourth] and we stayed together. Tonight, we did the opposite.”

The Nets now enter Thursday’s showdown with the Knicks, the two clubs trying to play The City Game, having lost 11 of their past 14 games, while the Knicks having lost nine straight.

Who’s excited for that 7 p.m. tip?

“It’s the rivalry,” said Kidd, “[but] both teams stink.”

If the Nets play anything like they did Tuesday night, they’ll have trouble getting a leg up on their crosstown rivals. Joe Johnson did his part, scoring 22 points, while Brook Lopez added 12, though only two of those points came after the first quarter for the undermanned Nets. Deron Williams (sprained left ankle), Paul Pierce (broken bone in right hand), Andrei Kirilenko (back spasms) and Jason Terry (sore left knee) all remained sidelined.

Denver had six players finish in double figures, led by former Knick Timofey Mozgov, who had 17 points, 20 rebounds and two blocked shots.

The Nets will return to the practice court today and try to figure out how to beat the Knicks, in a game that will be a spectacle for far different reasons than expected when the schedule was unveiled this summer.

“I think, at this point, we are trying to figure out who we are and fix this,” Garnett said. “We are at home getting beat by 30, 40 points, and that’s not what we want. That’s not even close to what we predicted where we wanted to be.

“We just want to understand and, like I said, there’s a lot of things going on here, but no excuses. … This is a non-excuse league. People don’t care about that. They care about performance and coming out, and we need to have a better showing at home.

“We need to have a better showing, period, and we will. We have no choice.”

At this point, they certainly can’t look much worse.