Here are my three thoughts on the Nets’ 104-93 win over the Bucks in Brooklyn Friday night:
1. Going small – playing a two point guard backcourt, moving Joe Johnson to small forward and re-inserting Paul Pierce into the starting lineup at power forward – worked well against the hapless – and thin upfront – Bucks Friday night. But the question now is whether or not Nets coach Jason Kidd is going to stick with that plan moving forward, or if he’s going to continue to mix-and-match his lineups.
Friday night’s starting five was the 13th starting lineup of the season through just 29 games for the Nets, who also have used the most combinations of lineups of any team in the NBA by a healthy margin. Part of that, of course, has been the amount of injuries the Nets have had, forcing Kidd to try a lot of different things. But, at some point, the Nets need to have some consistency in what they’re doing if they want to start getting this thing even somewhat turned around.
With Andray Blatche missing from the team for this road trip for personal reasons and Brook Lopez out for the season, the Nets seem to have little choice to speed up the tempo now, something Kidd said they wouldn’t do after Lopez’s injury but several players said made sense. With Pierce playing at power forward and Mirza Teletovic shooting the ball well off the bench, the Nets could have a “stretch” four on the floor at all times, allowing them to push the tempo and spread the floor as they did against the Bucks.
2. Speaking of Teletovic, he’s in the midst of the best stretch of his NBA career, with double-figure scoring outings in five of his last seven games and scoring at least eight points in six of his last seven games.
Over that stretch, Teletovic is shooting 31-for-68 (45.6 percent) from the field, including an impressive 21-for-47 (44.7 percent) from behind the 3-point arc, and has also shown an ability to get to the rim or create for others off the dribble. He’s had trouble stopping some bigger opponents, be it the Pacers or Bulls bigs earlier this week, for example, but he’s at least been largely able to replace the points he’s given up at one end by scoring at the other.
If the Nets play in a quicker system and with more floor-spacing, having a power forward like Teletovic on the floor can have a big impact. To dovetail with the first point in this rewind, we’ll see how Kidd wants to move forward.
3. In a rather surprising turn of events, it took 29 games for the trio of players who came to Brooklyn in the blockbuster trade with the Celtics on draft night – Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry – to all finish in double figures in the same game. Yes, some of that is because Terry has missed a bunch of time with a sore left knee, but it’s still clear that none of them have contributed anywhere near where they were expected to when the Nets brought them here.
Regardless of everything else going on, the Nets are going to need Pierce to get back on track, Garnett to increase his production in the wake of Lopez’s season-ending injury, and Terry to knock down 3-pointers like he did Friday night. There’s little margin for error when you start the season 10 games under .500, even in the horrid Eastern Conference.