MIAMI — When the Nets started this $190 million experiment at Duke University back in October, they knew the path to the championship they hoped to win eventually was going to go through South Beach.
But those championship dreams died on the shores of Biscayne Bay Wednesday night, as it ran into the immovable object that is LeBron James and the Heat, who dispatched the Nets 96-94 in Game 5 of this Eastern Conference semifinal in front of a sellout crowd inside AmericanAirlines Arena.
The Heat advance to the Eastern Conference finals, while the Nets will head home for the summer and contemplate what could have been.
“We fell short of our goal,” Paul Pierce said.
The Nets certainly had their chances, going right down to the wire in both Game 4 and Game 5 of this series, only to fall short. After missing seven shots in a row over the final six minutes of Game 4 before a meaningless garbage time layup, the Nets missed nine in a row after Joe Johnson — who led the Nets with 34 points — hit a step-back jumper to give them a 91-83 lead with 4:49 remaining.
“Just being aggressive,” Johnson said of his mind-set in the second half, when he scored 24 points and made nine of his first 10 shots. “I wasn’t paying attention to the last shot. I was looking forward to the next. Obviously I got into a little rhythm, just trying to make plays for us.”
But after Johnson hit that shot, the Nets’ offense went cold as Miami went on a 12-0 run over the next several minutes — capped by a pair of free throws from Ray Allen with 21.6 seconds left that gave the Heat a 95-91 lead it would never relinquish.
“It’s another one we let slip away,” Deron Williams said after scoring 17 points. “These last two are really hard to take right now, because we could easily be up 3-2 … it’s tough right now.”
The Nets still wound up getting one more chance, though, as after Johnson hit a corner 3-pointer with 11.4 seconds left to make it 95-94, James made one of two free throws a second later to make it 96-94.
But after knocking the ball out of Pierce’s hands with 4.4 seconds to go, James forced Johnson to take the ball toward the middle of the floor after receiving an inbounds pass from Shaun Livingston. Allen got his hand on the ball to knock it away before Johnson could go up for a potential game-tying jumper.
As the ball dribbled harmless away from Johnson as time expired, James sprinted to the scorer’s table, leapt on top of it and flexed his muscles, while the Nets trudged off the court in and into their summer, after failing to dethrone the King and the champs.
“It was a tough situation,” said Allen, who finished with 13 points and also hit a 3-pointer with 32 seconds left to give the Heat a 93-91 lead. “[Johnson] was so hot. He had made so many shots over the top of us.
“I was trying to help [off of Pierce] but not too much, and then he had his back to me and I just kind of stuck my hand in there and dug it away a little bit. We just did what we had to do when we needed it.”
While the Heat did what they had to do to win these last two games, the Nets left the series feeling like they left something on the table. Bringing in players like Pierce and Kevin Garnett last summer, they expected to be able to make the necessary plays down the stretch of crucial playoff games like these.
Instead, in the two biggest games of the season, the two-time defending champions made the one or two crucial plays in the final moments to not only seal a pair of wins, but also the Nets’ fate.
“When you’re playing in close games on the road, you don’t have a lot of room for error,” Pierce said. “We just came up short in a game of inches. We were right there, we played as hard as we could, but sometimes we didn’t play smart enough, and that’s the way bounces sometimes.
“Sometimes things have to go perfect when you play the best team in the NBA, and we almost put together the perfect game and came up short.”
Now the Nets will have all summer to think about how close they came.