The Nets, who had lost three games in a row and eight of the previous 10, came up with a desperately needed win Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn against the 76ers, taking an early lead and then holding onto it until they came away with a 95-92 victory in front of a sellout crowd inside Barclays Center.
Here are some of my thoughts on the game:
— There was no bigger topic in the Nets’ universe all week than their offense, which comes as no surprise after Deron Williams turned it into the topic of the week with his comments about how the system that his coach, Avery Johnson, has been employing isn’t necessarily the best fit for him.
So it’s fitting that the Nets, who spent the two days of practice between Wednesday’s loss to the Knicks at the Garden and Sunday’s win over the Sixers working on their offense and installing some new sets, got their much-needed win over Philadelphia by using some of those new looks on back-to-back possessions in the dying moments of the game to get a pair of clean looks for Williams – one a 3-pointer from the wing with 1:04 remaining and the other a layup with 40.5 seconds to go.
As you might expect, given the tenor of the week and the need for a win, everyone after the game was praising the new sets, saying that they worked as well as they possible could have. Both Avery Johnson and Joe Johnson said that the new sets worked to near perfection, with the Nets scoring on seven of the eight times that they ran them.
“Yeah, we had some great looks today, and the new offense that he did put in was almost 100 percent,” Johnson said. We may not have scored on it once, but we ran it eight or nine times, and it was successful.
“It just gives us a lot more movement, and guys aren’t just standing around watching Brook post or me post or Deron post. It gives us a lot more options, and tonight it was great.”
— Along those lines, is it possible that Williams is finally turning the corner with his shooting percentages? The star point guard has gone 17-for-35 from the field (48.6 percent) over the past three games, and is now up to nearly 40 percent for the season. The biggest thing that I’ve noticed is Williams has stopped settling for 3-pointers, whether they’re open or not.
Instead, he’s made it a point of trying to get to the basket, or to try and get some mid-range jumpers off of curls and double-screens instead of settling for 25-footers that haven’t been falling all season long. That was evident against Philadelphia, when he passed up a couple of early open 3-pointers and instead got into the lane and either tried to make some passes or got up some shots from in close.
“Early [in the game] I didn’t want to settle for threes,” said Williams, who finished with 16 points, six rebounds and five assists. “I’ve been having a lot of open threes, and shots that I can normally make, and they’re not falling. I wanted to try to put the ball on the floor until it feels better.”
— Yesterday also saw a continuation of the recent hot shooting from Joe Johnson, who has played extremely well after a not unexpected uneven start to the season. Johnson is averaging 20.4 points over his last seven games after scoring 22 against Philadelphia, to go along with 47.3 percent shooting overall and 43.6 percent from 3-point range.
And while Williams closed the game out with nine fourth quarter points, including seven inside the final minute, Johnson scored 10 points to help the Nets maintain their slim lead in the third quarter, including scoring the final eight points of the quarter for the Nets. The final six of those came on a pair of back-to-back bombs from well behind the 3-point line, including a 31-footer at the buzzer.
“It’s just instincts,” Johnson said of those shots. “You’re not out there thinking, you’re just playing. When the ball was swinging to me, I was just catching it and just shooting it.
“That last one I had shot, I’d made a couple so I was pretty confident in shooting from deep, so C.J. [Watson] got me the ball as the clock was winding down, and I didn’t want to take too many dribbles to where I was taking a rushed shot, so I took my time and took a pull-up three, and it just went down.”
— The switch to a smaller lineup for the Nets seemed to work well yesterday, as Gerald Wallace had a nice game (14 points, nine rebounds, six assists) at power forward and Keith Bogans, who slid into the starting lineup for Kris Humphries, scored 13 points and hit three of his four attempts from behind the 3-point arc.
But the biggest impact the switch seems to have had is on Humphries, who went from starting 20 of the season’s first 25 games to being entirely out of the rotation. Now Humphries, who averaged a double-double each of the past two seasons and was re-signed to a two-year, $24 million contract, looks like he’s found a semi-permanent spot on the bench as a spectator, and possibly has become nothing more than what will be an expiring contract in six months’ time.
“Obviously he wasn’t thrilled,” Nets coach Avery Johnson said after his meeting with Humphries before Sunday’s game. “But I explained to him where I was and what I saw on the court. He’s been here with me since day one, and I really respect him and I really do like him.
“He’s worked hard, I’ve gone to bat for him in a lot of situations since day one, so I just think it’s a tough situation for him. It’s not like he was jumping up and giving me a hug and was really excited about it. But I just told him this is the way we’ve got to go, and we’ll see where we go from here, and if I call his name he’s going to have to be ready to go, whether he’s at four or at five.”
Humphries, to his credit, handled the situation about as well as a person possibly could. But it’s clear that the Nets are planning on moving forward with a power forward rotation of Wallace, Reggie Evans and possibly Andray Blatche, and that Humphries is, barring injury, on the outside looking in.
— The same can be said of Mirza Teletovic and Josh Childress, both of whom were healthy scratches from yesterday’s lineup. Childress, who signed a non-guaranteed contract, seems to be more and more unlikely to secure a guaranteed deal for the rest of the season once contracts become guaranteed on Jan. 10, with the Nets instead opting to use that spot to either try some players from the D-League or to have more flexibilities in trades or potential buy-out candidates after the deadline.
Part of that may have factored into the playing time for Tornike Shengelia yesterday, as the Nets continue to try to find a few minutes of filler time off the bench at the small forward spot. If Shengelia is capable of doing that, that will make Childress even more expendable.
Teletovic, on the other hand, is even farther down the pecking order than Humphries. The simple fact of the matter is that the Bosnian sharpshooter’s skill set doesn’t really have a home on the roster right now. Teletovic is a stretch four who isn’t a strong defender or rebounder, but instead knocks down open shots. But on a Nets team without a dominant defensive presence at the five, it is hard to mask Teletovic’s defensive weaknesses. So he, like Humphries, may be seeing a lot of time on the bench in the days and weeks to come.
tbontemps@nypost.com