You could see it in DeMar DeRozan’s eyes, hear it in his voice: the Raptors were cooked in the layup lines. They had no idea what they were getting into. All that talk of experience that seemed so trite the past few games? Finally, we saw why it really can be a big deal.
“We didn’t realize we had Brooklyn against the wall,” DeRozan said quietly shaking his head, the Raptors’ gifted guard copping to a team-wide malaise, setting up the throttling they had just endured. “They came out and started throwing haymakers.”
This is what the Nets wanted to believe about themselves all along, going back to Durham, N.C., back to the first hours of training camp. This is how they viewed themselves before the slings and arrows of the regular season started chipping away at that veneer, before the rigors of a rugged playoff series nudged their toes to the brink of the abyss.
Maybe greatness on demand was too much to ask across the season’s first 87 games. But Friday night at Barclays Center, they were able to summon their inner Superteam when they needed it most desperately. They were able to buy themselves at least two more days of basketball. The final score was 97-83, 14 points that felt like 40.
One game left to decide the series.
One game left to define this team, and this season.
“I liked our energy,” Nets coach Jason Kidd said. “We were aggressive from the start. For 48 minutes guys executed, we shared the ball. Guys stepped up and made plays on both ends.”
Experience didn’t help the Nets much in Game 4, when they could have put a death grip on this series and instead came up micro small in the game’s final five minutes. It didn’t wind up mattering as much as they wanted it to during that furious fourth quarter of Game 5, when they nearly fashioned a miracle inside Air Canada Centre.
But now … well, it’s hard not to wonder. The Raptors’ youthful exuberance was good enough to build a 26-point lead in Game 5, and their recklessness was enough to squander every ounce of it, and then to come out sleepy and sloppy in Game 6. How bad was it? Combine that fourth quarter and this first quarter, and it was 78-43, Nets.
And it was every bit as lopsided as those numbers indicate.
“This,” Paul Pierce said, “is what the NBA is all about, these pressure-type moments. These are the types of games that elevate the good players to great players.”
Sitting beside Pierce as he said this, his ankle throbbing, was Deron Williams, who had taken that very elevator Friday night. So profound was Williams’ funk for most of this series that “Missing” posters were planted on telephone poles around the Barclays neighborhood. It was a humorous interpretation of what had become a troubling truth: Williams had been vastly outplayed by Toronto’s Dwight Lowry, and had been one of the culprits for why the Nets faced elimination.
And when the Nets needed their cornerstone to do something cornerstone-ish? He did that. He had 23 points and four assists, he outplayed Lowry, and he did much of it on an ankle that he rolled in the third quarter.
“He showed a lot of heart, a lot of grit,” Kevin Garnett said. “He was beat up a little bit, but he sucked it up and got through it. That’s our leader.”
Williams figures to spend a lot of time getting treatment between here and tip-off Sunday, and much of what will happen for the Nets in Game 7 will be a direct result of how those sessions go.
One strong game doesn’t erase all that preceded it, and it certainly doesn’t rescue Williams’ reputation as a Net.
But it is still there to be rescued. Same as the team, same as the season. Go back to October. Read those quotes. Listen to those players. This was a team that believed it was supposed to play like this every night. We can talk about all that went wrong between there and here. None of that will matter if they can summon their inner Superteam one more time.
Or just one more well-timed haymaker.