The Knicks did this to themselves. Carmelo Anthony will be busy fixing his shoulder and Phil Jackson will be busy trying to fix his team, while the basketball Garden is dark.
Nothing but Nets.
A buzz grows in Brooklyn. Mikhail Prokhorov lusted for this moment, for a team with championship ambition, for the lone New York playoff spotlight shining inside Barclays Center.
Nothing but Nets.
The hiring of a rookie head coach such as Jason Kidd looked like Russian roulette in the beginning, but not now, when he brings a team built for the postseason into the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs against the Raptors on Saturday in Toronto.
He brings a team no one, not even two-time defending-champs LeBron James and the Heat, should want to play.
No one is expecting Kidd, without Brook Lopez, to be chasing his second ring in the NBA Finals, because there aren’t even any guarantees the Nets will survive the Raptors. But anytime you can show up in April and May with a rested Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, not to mention a healthier Deron Williams and an emerging Mason Plumlee and a professional closer like Joe Johnson and a rock like Shaun Livingston, you should be considered dangerous.
And should the Nets march toward a showdown with the Heat, there won’t be any knees knocking in Brooklyn, not after sweeping them away during the regular season.
Which means nothing now, of course. The regular season was little more than an extended laboratory experiment for Kidd and the Nets, designed to preserve the old bones of old warriors over the 82-game marathon, expressly for this sprint that legends are asked to run.
“The bigger picture,” Kidd said when he was hired, “is to keep these guys healthy going into the playoffs.”
Billy King’s blockbuster trade for Pierce and Garnett was necessitated by the disturbing lack of physical and mental toughness exhibited by P.J. Carlesimo’s Nets during their first-round elimination last season by the Bulls. The Nets stopped being perceived as soft and leaderless the second Pierce and Garnett showed up. Veteran teams don’t panic under duress in the playoffs.
But it will take more than the mere presence and savvy of Pierce and Garnett for the Nets to make noise amid the silence of the jams inside MSG.
Any Nets designs on any takeover of this basketball city, however temporary, is contingent upon Williams being the best player on the court more often than not. Better than his counterpart in Toronto, Kyle Lowry. Because more often than not, he has not been The $98 Million Straw That Stirs The Drink.
There are no excuses now for Williams. His barking ankles do not appear to be significantly kneecapping his game anymore. He has a chance to change the narrative about him once and for all. Kidd taking him under his wing, genius by osmosis, was supposed to make all the difference. No better time than now. What former Nets general manager Rod Thorn said a year ago about Kidd the Knick before the 2013 playoffs began needs to apply to Williams now: “He was so tough mentally, he wouldn’t let you lose.”
It should not be lost on anyone that three Raptor starters — DeMar DeRozan, Terrence Ross and Jonas Valanciunas — have never experienced the playoffs. That this will be the franchise’s first playoff appearance in six years. That Pierce has played 136 playoff games. That Garnett has played 131 playoff games.
Neither should it be lost on anyone that Kidd and the Nets have turned Barclays into the kind of hostile home Mike Woodson expected the Garden to be.
As for Kidd, well, no one dare compare him with Gregg Popovich, but no one regards him as a soda jerk attempting to buy time to diagram a last-second play.
Kidd, from his New Jersey Net days, can tell his team what it is like to have the New York stage to yourself. When the Nets made it as far as the NBA Finals in 2002 and 2003 — only to lose to the Phil Jackson Lakers and Spurs, respectively — the Knicks were 30-52 in 2001-02 — when Jeff Van Gundy quit after 19 games and Don Chaney relieved him — and 37-45 in 2002-03.
Prokhorov was castigated as a brazen interloper when his Blueprint for Greatness billboard across from the Garden openly taunted James Dolan and the Knicks. As the Knicks lick their wounds from a lost season and wait ’til next year again, his team playing meaningful games is the only billboard Prokhorov needs.