Everything the Nets did last summer — from hiring Jason Kidd to trading for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to signing Andrei Kirilenko, among other moves — was done with one idea in mind: to give Deron Williams every opportunity to become an elite player once again.
And, after an up-and-down season for the second year in a row, Williams still has a chance to do so, starting this weekend when the playoffs will begin for the Nets in either Chicago or Toronto.
“I think we’ve been playing pretty good basketball since Jan. 1, and we’ve just got to build on that,” Williams said before the Nets and Knicks squared off in Brooklyn in their anticlimactic fourth and final game of the season. “We’re built for the playoffs, but I think it’s most important we get healthy.
“If we have everybody healthy, if we have everybody whole, we can go in with a whole head of steam.”
For the second year in a row, health hasn’t always been assured for Williams, who has endured nagging ankle injuries after signing a five-year, $100 million contract in July 2012 to remain a Net and become the face of the franchise’s move across the Hudson.
But since re-upping, things haven’t gone according to plan. After playing on Team USA and winning a gold medal at the 2012 Olympics in London, Williams played through synovitis in both ankles throughout the first half of last season, undergoing multiple rounds of cortisone shots as well as a round of platelet rich plasma treatments around the All-Star break. He returned to star status over the second half of the season, but took at least some of the blame for Avery Johnson’s dismissal as head coach along the way.
Things fell apart, however, in the first round of the playoffs, as the Nets lost to the injury-riddled Bulls in seven games — including a loss in Game 7 at home — leading to interim coach P.J. Carlesimo not being retained, and the beginning of a search for a new coach.
That search surprisingly wound up with Williams’ friend and a player he idolized, Kidd, becoming the team’s coach, and was followed by Nets general manager Billy King sparing no expense to surround Williams with talent. The Nets’ payroll swelled to over $190 million, including luxury taxes, this season.
But then Williams suffered a sprained ankle in an offseason workout and he missed almost all of the preseason. He wound up dealing with separate sprains in each ankle over the season’s first two months while the Nets floundered to a 10-21 record. He missed five games in January, and underwent another round of cortisone injections and platelet rich plasma treatment.
The procedures seem to have worked once again, as Williams has seemed to have an additional bounce to his game in the second half of the season while the Nets have, not coincidentally, taken off since the start of January.
“I think Deron has gotten better as the year has gone on, but the biggest thing is his health,” Kidd said. “He’s gotten healthy, so hopefully that continues through the playoffs.”
Whether it does or not, everything the Nets have done over the past year was done with making a deep playoff run in mind. Whether they do will depend largely on whether Williams can prove he’s still the elite player the Nets thought he was when they re-signed him two years ago.