It was a different night, but the same old story.
The Nets, who have struggled to get themselves going in the third quarter all season, saw the Knicks break the game open with a 18-6 run over the final 6:54 of the third quarter last night to hand the Nets a 100-86 loss, giving the Nets three straight losses and eight in their last 10 games.
“We’re just trying to stay alive right now,” Gerald Wallace said. “Right now, we know the second half is our downfall. We play 24 minutes of great ball in the first half, and then it just seems like our next 12 minutes we’re kind of lost offensively and defensively.
“We’ve got to figure out, as a team, how we can fix that and get this team turned around.”
It looked as if the Nets might, at least for one night, shake their third-quarter demons after Deron Williams came out firing to start the quarter. Williams hit his first four shots of the third, including a pull-up jumper in transition that gave the Nets their biggest lead of the game at 61-57 with 6:54 remaining in the third.
From there, though, it was a familiar story. A combination of poor shooting, turnovers and allowing easy baskets to their opponents put the Nets into a 75-67 hole by the end of the third quarter that they never escaped from.
“I just think mentally, we’ve got to be more mentally into the game in the second half, myself included,” Wallace said. “We’re messing up on coverages, especially guarding a team like this that makes you pay for any mistake you make.
“Mentally, as a team, we’ve got to buckle down. We understand what’s going on. We know what’s wrong with us, and we’ve just got to fix it.”
The Knicks stormed back into the lead for good on the backs of their two stars, Carmelo Anthony and Tyson Chandler, who combined for 15 of the 18 points that put the game out of reach. While Anthony scored from both outside, hitting a 3-pointer to put the Knicks ahead for good at 62-61 with 5:39 left, the Nets couldn’t keep Chandler away from the basket, allowing him to get several uncontested dunks off alley-oop passes thanks to pick-and-roll coverage breakdowns.
“We had a game plan that we tried to execute tonight at the defensive end, and it wasn’t working,” said Williams, who finished with 16 points and 10 assists. “We weren’t doing the things we needed to. We weren’t getting the help in the right spots, our rotations were slow, we were letting guys drive right to the basket without any help … that’s not how we want to play.”
The Nets, who don’t play again until Sunday against the Sixers in Brooklyn, know they don’t want to play like this. Now they just have to figure out how to get back to playing the way they did when they won 11 of their first 15 games.
“We’re frustrated,” said Williams. “We’ve got to change some things. We’ve got to get better.
“It’s on us. It’s not anybody’s fault but us as players. We have to come out with more energy and focus. It’s like we lost a little bit of our toughness, so we have to get that back.”