AUBURN HILLS, Mich. — The Nets have suffered through one piece of bad injury news after another so far this season, but it appears they may have finally caught a break.
Although Brook Lopez sat out Friday night’s 103-99 loss to the Pistons with a sprained left ankle — the same type of injury that cost him seven games last month — he said he should be on the sidelines for a much shorter time period.
“It’s loads better than it was [Thursday],” Lopez said before the game. “It’s not nearly the severity of the last sprain. But [Nets athletic trainer Tim Walsh] made the call that we’re going to take the night off and take a few extra days [to rest it].”
Lopez said the expectation is for him to return to the lineup for Monday’s game against the 76ers in Brooklyn.
“That’s exactly it,” he said. “That’s the plan.”
Lopez was posting up against Blake Griffin in the third quarter of Thursday night’s 102-93 victory over the Clippers when he fell awkwardly and stayed down after passing the ball to Joe Johnson for a 3-pointer. Lopez checked out of the game briefly, before coming back in — again briefly — and then exiting the game for good and being escorted to the locker room by Walsh.
Lopez initially sprained the ankle late in the fourth quarter of the Nets’ 100-98 overtime win in Phoenix on Nov. 15 when he landed on Kevin Garnett’s foot inside the final minute of regulation, though he wound up staying in and finishing the game.
After Deron Williams drove past Brandon Jennings with 24 seconds left and had the ball knocked out of his hands and out of bounds, the officials took the opportunity to review the play.
But while it was easy to see Jennings grab Williams by the arm and prevent his dribble, the only course of action the officials could take was to watch the ball bounce off of Williams and sail out of bounds, giving the ball to Detroit with the Nets trailing by four and essentially ending Brooklyn’s best chance to get back in the game.
“That’s the way it’s set right now, where if they call it out of bounds and it’s Brooklyn’s ball, they have to go back and look at it,” Nets coach Jason Kidd said. “It’s just one way right now until [the league] looks at it and maybe adding [to the replay rules].
“But you go by the rules, and right now the rule is they go to look to see who it was out on, and it was out on [Williams], unfortunately. We felt he got fouled, but you play on.”
The way the rules are set up now leaves officials in the uncomfortable position of seeing an incorrect or missed foul call, but being unable to do anything about it. Giving the officials the leeway to make the correct call in such a situation could be beneficial all the way around, but Kidd said such a change isn’t up to him.
“I’m not on the [competition] committee, so I’m sticking to coaching,” he said with a smile. “I’ll leave that to the committee somewhere down the road to look at it, but right now you go by the rules, and it was off [Williams] and you have to keep playing.”
As for Williams, he stayed out of the situation entirely.
“I’m not going to talk about stuff like that,” he said. “It’s grounds to get you fined.”