SAN ANTONIO — Following all of the headline-grabbing moves this summer, from hiring Jason Kidd to trading for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to signing Andrei Kirilenko, everything kept coming back to the same thing: the Nets are Deron Williams’ team.
Kidd said repeatedly Williams would be the “engine” that would propel this high-priced roster, while Pierce said Williams was going to be a legitimate top-five MVP candidate. But, like so many other things about these Nets, Williams hasn’t come close to living up to those lofty expectations.
After spending virtually all of training camp nursing a sprained right ankle suffered during a September workout, followed by missing 11 games with a sprained left ankle, Williams is averaging 12.7 points and 7.2 assists through 19 games — far from the MVP-caliber numbers Pierce and many others expected from him, just as the Nets have fallen far short of their own expectations and everyone else’s this season.
That includes Williams 14 points and six assists in the Nets’ 105-91 loss to the Pacers Saturday night in Indianapolis, the fifth loss in six games for the Nets, and their third in four games since Brook Lopez was lost for the season with a fracture in his right foot.
After the Nets were blown out by those same Pacers Monday night in Brooklyn, Williams stood inside the locker room and said he needed to do more in the wake of Lopez’s season-ending injury.
“I need to play better,” Williams said. “I need to be more aggressive for us to have a chance, especially with Brook going down.”
But when Williams was asked if he’d been doing that recently after appearing to play tentatively throughout Saturday’s loss, Williams’ response was to the point.
“No,” he said.
When asked what needs to happen for that to change, he responded, “I just have to be more aggressive.”
The Nets could certainly use more from their franchise point guard, given they are without their All-Star center for the remainder of the season, while his backup, Andray Blatche, is away from the team for personal reasons for at least Tuesday’s game against the Spurs and Thursday’s in Oklahoma City. Kirilenko remains sidelined with back spasms.
But when asked after Saturday’s game whether he’s getting enough from Williams specifically, Kidd said he needed more from everyone, not just his floor general.
“I need everybody to be better,” Kidd said. “We can only do it as a team and it’s not going to be one person. It can’t be just Deron. It can’t be just KG or Paul. It’s got to be the whole team on a nightly basis, and right now we’re not getting that.”
Getting improved play from Williams, however, would be a pretty good place to start, as he and the Nets try to figure out exactly what is causing a season that not long ago had so much promise to go so far off the rails.
“I think everything’s a work in progress right now,” Williams said. “We’re not winning basketball games. Until then, I think everything is a work in progress.”