OAKLAND – Here are my three thoughts on the Nets’ 93-86 loss to the Warriors on Saturday night:
1. If the Nets were going to come away from this six game swing through the West with better than a 3-3 record, they were going to have to win one of the three tough games on the trip: Saturday night against the Warriors, Wednesday against the Trail Blazers and Thursday against the Nuggets.
Now, obviously they still will have chances to come away with a win in one of those final two “tough” games, but the fact they had a golden opportunity to steal a win against the Warriors in a game that was there for the taking Saturday night was tough for them to swallow afterwards.
“This definitely was a winnable game for us,” Paul Pierce said afterwards.
And Pierce was right – this game was definitely one the Nets could have – and arguably should have – come away from with a win. The Warriors were missing both Andrew Bogut and David Lee, and the Nets held Stephen Curry to 17 points, though he did go 3-for-4 from 3-point range, including an absurd 3-pointer from the wing that banked home to seal the win with 37 seconds left. But the Nets went just 2-for-21 from 3-point range themselves, missing several wide-open looks, and generally struggled offensively.
If the Nets finish this trip 3-3 or worse, they’ll look back at Saturday night’s game as the one that kept this trip from being a much more successful one than it could have been.
2. Saying the Nets struggle to rebound and protect the rim at this point is, frankly, a bit pointless. As Pierce said after the game, at this point in the season the Nets “are what we are.”
But, as Pierce went on to say, if the Nets are going to struggle to rebound – as they have particularly since switching to the smaller lineup – they need to do the things they do well consistently in order to get victories. And besides their shooting struggles, the Nets have done a very good job of both protecting the ball offensively and forcing their opponents to turn it over at the other end.
Neither of those things happened against Golden State, however. The Nets committed 16 turnovers that led to 18 Warriors points – including two awful turnovers by Joe Johnson in the final minute of the game – and only forced Golden State into 10 turnovers that resulted in seven Nets points, with only three of those turnovers coming after the first quarter.
If the Nets are going to continue to play this way, that simply won’t be good enough.
3. The Nets have seen two of their key reserves, Alan Anderson and Mirza Teletovic, go into deep freezes from behind the 3-point arc in recent weeks. Since the start of February, Anderson is just 7-for-28 (25 percent) from 3-point range, including four games where he didn’t make a single three, while Teletovic is 9-for-43 (28.9 percent). If you take away Teletovic’s one monster game, when he went 5-for-9 against the Sixers on Feb. 3, he’s just 4-for-34 (11.8 percent).
That’s why, if the Nets do manage to get Glen Davis to sign with them, it seems possible that both Anderson and Teletovic could be relegated to lesser roles in favor of newly acquired Marcus Thornton and Davis in coming games. If Anderson, and particularly Teletovic, are not hitting their 3-point shots, their usefulness drops sharply.