Back during the dark days of November and December, there were plenty of people who wondered whether the Nets would ever be able to turn things around this season — including some of the Nets themselves.
But three months after their season appeared to be spiraling toward disaster, the Nets completed their remarkable 2014 turnaround Tuesday night with a 105-96 victory over the Rockets at Barclays Center, clinching a playoff berth for the second consecutive year — with nine games to spare.
“Honestly, I couldn’t even see it [happening],” Joe Johnson said after scoring a game-high 32 points to secure the playoff-clinching win for the Nets (40-33). “I kept saying to myself, ‘Eventually, it’s going to turn around. Things are going to turn around for us.’
“Eventually, they did.”
It did for a variety of reasons, beginning with the changes the Nets made Jan. 2 in Oklahoma City — just under two weeks after the team’s best player, Brook Lopez, was lost for the season with a fractured fifth metatarsal in his right foot.
In the wake of Lopez’s injury, Nets coach Jason Kidd chose to switch to a smallball lineup by inserting Shaun Livingston into the backcourt next to Deron Williams and sliding Joe Johnson to small forward, Paul Pierce to power forward and Kevin Garnett to center after the Nets were embarrassed by the Spurs in San Antonio on New Year’s Eve to fall to 10-21.
But once Kidd made that switch, the Nets have taken off. Since then, they’ve gone 30-12 — the best record in the Eastern Conference over that span — including a 20-2 mark at Barclays Center, with Tuesday’s win setting a franchise record of 14 straight home victories.
In the meantime, the Nets have proven Kidd’s faith in them correct, as he has picked up a pair of Eastern Conference Coach of the Month Awards — one for January and another for March, when the Nets went 12-4.
“I’ve seen too many games,” Kidd said when asked if he ever wondered if things would turn around. “The league is very fragile … things change quickly.
“We took our lumps, but we felt that we could get better, and right now we are. But, again, we still have a long way to go.”
That was the mantra coming out of the Nets locker room after they knocked off the Rockets (49-24), who were missing both Dwight Howard and point guard Patrick Beverley.
Unlike in recent games, when the Nets beat teams by hitting a barrage of 3-pointers, they went just 6-for-25 from deep against the Rockets, instead riding Johnson’s stellar shooting and taking advantage of porous perimeter defense from Jeremy Lin and James Harden to slice through Houston’s defense at will.
“I think it’s a good win,” said Deron Williams, who had 12 points and six assists. “It’s a solid win. With Dwight out, sometimes you can have a lapse, and we didn’t do that tonight.”
“We played well defensively … this is a high-powered offense, and I think early on when they made their run we gave up some transition buckets, 3s, but in the second half I thought we cut down on those, and did a better job of closing out and playing solid defense on them.”
The Nets held the normally high-flying Rockets to just 38.1 percent shooting overall and 28.6 percent (10-for-35) from behind the 3-point arc in what was their latest impressive defensive effort without Kevin Garnett, who missed his 17th game in a row due to his ongoing bout with back spasms.
Playing that kind of defense without Garnett, like so many other things that have changed for the Nets over the past three months, is something that would have been hard to believe back in the dark days of November and December.
Now, the Nets are hoping they can carry their momentum into the playoffs and make the kind of run they felt they could before things fell apart early on.
“We expected to be in the playoffs,” Pierce said. “This is just another step toward our goal. We’re happy with the way we’ve been playing lately over the last couple of months at home against quality ball clubs.
“But, as far as making the playoffs, this is something we already expected to do. We’re happy to make the playoffs, but that’s just a small goal of ours.”