Here are my three thoughts on the Nets’ 108-98 loss to the Trail Blazers in Brooklyn Monday night:
1. For everything that happened during Monday’s game, the players-only meeting that took place afterwards trumped all prior events. By the time the locker room opened 25 minutes after the game, virtually all of the players had left, or were in the process of leaving. Only Shaun Livingston, Jason Terry and rookie Mason Plumlee bothered to speak to the assembled media in the locker room, and only two players – Joe Johnson and Alan Anderson – spoke about the meeting itself in any kind of extended form in comments to The Post.
By all indications from both players, it seems like it was a fairly calm meeting, as these go, with no tempers really flaring (like it seems they did for the Cavaliers during a recent players-only meeting). But the tenor of the meeting still doesn’t change that the Nets decided it was a bad enough situation – with the team now at 3-7 after losing five of its last six games – to hold one.
“It was just us amongst ourselves talking,” Johnson said.
So what were they talking about? Johnson hinted at the answer when asked if Monday night’s was even more frustrating than recent losses because the Nets had jumped out to a lead after setting a season high for points in a quarter (40 in first quarter) and a half (63 in first half).
“Yeah, that’s probably the biggest thing,” Johnson said. “We were riding pretty high and clicking offensively. We weren’t getting a lot of stops, but we had enough to where we had a double-figure lead, and we just blew it all away.”
Johnson also said the word “chemistry” four separate times during his interview as he walked out of the arena, an ambiguous term that can mean a million things when it comes to how basketball players are fitting together on the court. The Nets can point to a lot of reasons why they may be lacking in chemistry right now – they have several new players, have had several players suffer injuries at various points since training camp began (including Deron Williams, Brook Lopez and Andrei Kirilenko sitting out Monday night) and working in a new coaching staff with new philosophies, as well.
But Johnson said the time for saying the Nets need more time is over.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’re learning on the fly. We’re learning game after game. We’re trying to figure it out.”
He’s right about this. The Nets may have plenty of new players to try to fit into a variety of different roles, and a new coach figuring out how to do so. But that doesn’t explain why they are 3-7, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what does. They’ve had a couple of bad losses (at Orlando, at Sacramento) and have just seemed a step off in several of their losses. It’s been a strange tenor to start such a highly anticipated season. It’s almost as if the Nets feel they can just turn it on whenever they want and beat any lesser opponents. They’re quickly learning, however, that’s not the case.
2. Both Johnson and Anderson hit on something that does help explain the team’s current state that’s stood out in watching the Nets through their first 10 games. Whenever the Nets start to see their shots missing, as they did Monday following their brilliant 40 points in the first quarter, they have almost immediately let their heads drop at both ends of the floor, leading to a snowball effect that leads to big runs for their opponents.
“It’s not us saying something as much as it’s body language,” Anderson said. “It’s more like, ‘Damn, I can’t believe I missed that shot. Damn.’ Then, when you get back, it’s like, ‘Aw, they scored. Damn, I’ve got to make that shot.’
“It just [should be], ‘Damn, I missed the shot. Let’s get the stop, and let’s get that shot again.’ It’s something minor, that especially with our team we should be … we’re just right there. We’ve got to just do it. Just do it.”
It’s been baffling to watch this team go through this game after game. They start to miss shots, they get frustrated and then allow their game to be affected, particularly defensively. This was a glaring problem during the Nets’ loss in Sacramento last week, when they couldn’t buy a basket in close (they were 8-for-25 through three quarters), then compounded that problem by allowing it to alter the way they played defensively, turning the game into a rout.
This is a problem you would expect to see a young, inexperienced team have. It’s not one that you would think a team with so many veteran players – six Nets have over 10 years of experience and nine are in at least their ninth year — would have.
“It seems like at one point in time we have pretty good chemistry,” Johnson said. “Then we just look like we don’t know what we’re out there doing. We get a little frustrated when the defensive schemes stop working, guys stop making shots and then the scheme is kind of out of the window.
“We’ve just got to stick to the game plan and see what we can do to get out of this.”
Importing Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Jason Terry, plus hiring Jason Kidd, was supposed to change that climate. So far, though, that hasn’t been the case.
“Once shots stop falling, we kind of hang our head, and when shots are going in, we’re not getting stops,” Anderson said, perfectly summing up the situation for the Nets at this point.
3. Speaking of Garnett and Pierce, it was pretty small-time of them to not speak after the game. Coming off a rough loss, with Lopez, Wiliams and Kirilenko banged up, players of their stature should have been available to speak after such the team meeting, if for no other reason than to project a calmness within the locker room.
Instead, by not speaking, they only made their situation worse and brought further heat upon themselves. They may not care, but it was pretty sad seeing rookie Mason Plumlee become one of three players to speak to the media postgame because his far older teammates couldn’t bother to do so.
But, regardless, the Nets now prepare to go to Charlotte for what has suddenly become a game with far more importance than ever would have been expected just a few weeks into the season. Given the rough end to the month the Nets have, with five of their next seven games on the road through Nov. 30, the Nets desperately need a win in Charlotte Wednesday. After a likely loss in Minnesota on Friday, they could also use wins over Detroit at home next Monday and in Toronto next Tuesday.
That would put them in position where, if they win one of the their three final games of the month (vs. Lakers on Nov. 27, at Houston on Nov. 29, at Memphis on Nov. 30), they would head into December – when they play a ton of games at home, with a favorable schedule to boot – at no worse than 7-10, and with a good chance to quickly get back over .500.
A loss to Charlotte, however, and the Nets would already be five games below .500. And no matter how much patience you want to stress, it’s hard to do so when a five-game winning streak won’t get you over .500.
“We’ve just got to finish games,” Anderson said. “We’re doing everything it takes to win, but we’re just not doing it consistently through the whole game. At the end of the game we got like 10 stops, but we couldn’t score nothing though. It’s just getting into that.
“We’re getting down on ourselves when we’re missing shots. We should get mad and get a stop and try it again.”
We’ll see if the Nets heed Anderson’s words Wednesday in Charlotte. The one thing that might be working in their favor? The Eastern Conference is horrible. With only four teams over .500, there’s plenty of time for the Nets to get on track. Still, though, this is nothing like what they expected would happen this season, where a game in Charlotte in mid-November would take on great significance.