MIAMI — The Nets came to Miami hoping to prove they had closed the gap from their blowout loss here early last month.
And while they fell short of getting a victory over the Heat, losing 102-89 last night in front of a sellout crowd of 19,961 at AmericanAirlines Arena, they left the building thinking they can go toe-to-toe with the defending champions.
“What gap?” Gerald Wallace said afterwards. “I think we’re just as good as them. We know what we’ve got to do offensively.
“You all watched the game. We were in the game pretty much until we started with unforced turnovers and giving them easy baskets, but other than that I felt like we controlled this game and we had an opportunity to win and we should have won.”
The Nets also left a strong impression with the Heat, who trailed for most of the first three quarters before ending the third with a 17-4 run to take the lead and then clamping down defensively to seal the win.
“We won at home,” said Dwyane Wade of the two Heat wins against the Nets. “We’re supposed to win at home. It’s gonna be a tough game when we go up there in Brooklyn, and we’ll really see.
“That team is gonna get better over there. Right now, they’ve got the [third] best record in the Eastern Conference, and they can still get a lot better, so our job is to take care of business at home and we’ve been able to do that.”
After shooting over 50 percent and committing just seven turnovers in an impressive first half to carry a 59-50 lead into the break, the Nets (11-5) went ice cold and started throwing the ball all over the place in the third quarter, allowing the Heat (12-3) to get back into the game.
Miami took the lead for the first time when James stole the ball and went coast-to-coast for a slam to put the Heat ahead 75-73 with 3:08 remaining in the third.
The Nets self-inflicted most of the damage in the second half, going 10-for-31 (32.3 percent) from the field and committing 12 turnovers — many due to the Heat double-teaming the Nets’ ball-handlers in pick-and-rolls.
“That’s all they were doing in the second half was taking us out of our ball screens and pick-and-rolls, and we definitely got careless with the ball,” said Deron Williams, who finished with 10 points, 12 assists and four turnovers — all in the second half.
The Nets couldn’t have played much better than they did in the first half, when they used their size advantage to attack the Heat inside. The frontline of Wallace, Kris Humphries and Andray Blatche, who finished with a team-high 20 points and eight rebounds, repeatedly scored high-percentage buckets around the rim.
But in the second half the Nets played like a team finishing its fifth game in seven nights — and on the second half of a back-to-back — against a team that had played only once in the same span.
As the Nets got sloppier at both ends, the Heat got more efficient, shooting 5-for-11 from 3-point range and committing just four turnovers in the second half as their swarming defense left the Nets scrambling just to get the ball out of double-teams, let alone being able to attack the basket.
And, before they knew it, a game that once looked winnable had slipped away.
“It was our fifth game in seven days, and I think we used up a lot of our energy in the first half,” Williams said. “Then they just got after us defensively and kind of deflated us in the second half.
“There’s some good things we can take away from the game and some bad things. It was another game where we couldn’t close out the game the way we wanted to.”