The Nets have had, by any standard, a good opening season in Brooklyn. They won 49 games, including a franchise record 23 on the road, and enter the playoffs with the fourth seed and homecourt advantage in the first round of the Eastern Conference Playoffs.
But despite all of that, plenty of people are picking the Nets to lose to the injury-plagued Bulls in their first round series, something that Deron Williams admitted that the Nets have noticed.
“I think even though we had the fourth seed, a lot of people were picking the Bulls,” Williams said before Saturday night’s opening game of the series at Barclays Center. “As far as that’s concerned, we want to win. We want to win the series. We feel like we can win this series if we play basketball the way we’re capable of playing.
“We’re excited about it, and we’re ready to go.”
The Nets are coming into this series confident, both in the fact that they hold homecourt advantage and that they’re as healthy as possible after spending the final two weeks of the season getting both Joe Johnson (sore left heel and right quad contusion) and Gerald Wallace (lower left leg contusion) back as close to 100 percent as they could.
They also expect that their grind-it-out, halfcourt style of play that they’ve employed all season long, utilizing the isolation skills of Johnson and Brook Lopez, in particular, is well suited to the deliberate nature of the playoffs.
“We’ve just got to go out there and work,” Johnson said. “We understand that nothing’s going to be easy or given to us. But I think I can speak for the players and the coaches … we don’t really care about the naysayers. We’re just gonna come out and try to handle business the way we know how.”
While Lopez is making his first playoff appearance, the Nets have several veterans – including Williams, Johnson, and Wallace – who have made multiple trips to the playoffs and are in search of a still-elusive championship ring. For interim coach P.J. Carlesimo – who led a team into a playoff series as a head coach for the first time since he was in Portland in 1997 – he expects that, as much as anything, to drive his veteran-laden team.
“I think a bunch of them are still disappointed that we didn’t get to 50 [wins],” Carlesimo said. “But yeah, there’s no question. These are obviously the series that people are going to focus on, and if more people are picking Chicago, that’s going to serve as a motivation. But, again, to me that’s more the storyline going into this game. The storyline after that is who is down [after Game One].”
But, in the end, Carlesimo said that the formula for the Nets gaining more respect is a simple one now that the playoffs have arrived: survive the Bulls and advance to an almost certain showdown in the Eastern Conference Semifinals against the defending champion Miami Heat.
“I still think that, as good of a year as we’ve had, that we’re still fighting for more respect,” Carlesimo said. “And the more respect will come from advancing. It’s simple.
“It’s the same way that 14 teams went home Wednesday … over the next two weeks, eight more teams are going home. That’s really what it’s all about.”
tbontemps@nypost.com