Here are three thoughts from the Nets’ 112-89 win over the Nuggets in Denver Thursday night:
1. There are very few things that can be taken away from the way the Nets played Thursday night, but one was this: Marcus Thornton appears to have already surpassed Alan Anderson in the rotation.
Thornton was in the game early Thursday night, and finished with 10 points on 3-for-7 shooting in 17 minutes, while Anderson didn’t get off the bench until the start of the fourth quarter, and finished with six points after playing the whole fourth quarter when the game was well out of hand.
Anderson has been struggling for the past few weeks, and it appears Nets coach Jason Kidd wants to give Thornton a chance to supplant him as the scoring wing off the bench. We’ll see if Thornton can take advantage of the opportunity.
2. Heading into this six-game road swing, the first five against teams from the Western Conference, the feeling was always the same: The Nets had three games they should win handily — at the Jazz, Lakers and Bucks. The key to a successful trip would be whether they’d be able to take games from the Warriors, Trail Blazers or Nuggets.
And while the Nets arguably should have beaten the Warriors and were utterly destroyed by the Trail Blazers — a pair of results that had fans incensed for wildly different reasons — the emphatic win over the Nuggets Thursday gives the Nets a chance to go back home with a 4-2 record on the trip if they can beat the league’s worst team, the Bucks, in Milwaukee Saturday night.
That’s a situation the Nets gladly would have signed up for heading into the trip, and while it may not have worked out the way they would have liked — given the fact that the Warriors were missing David Lee and Andrew Bogut and the Blazers were missing LaMarcus Aldridge, the potential was there for the Nets to sweep the trip — going 4-2 on a two-week road trip is nothing to sneeze at in the NBA.
3. After a dreadful game against Portland, it wasn’t surprising to see Andray Blatche flip the switch and play excellently against the Nuggets, finishing with nine points and nine rebounds in 17 minutes.
The past 48 hours pretty much perfectly encapsulated Blatche’s extremes. The Nets have gotten plenty more of the good than bad from him over the course of the season, but they could use a little less of the wild swings from one side to the other.