CLEVELAND — Before last night’s game against the Cavaliers, Nets coach Avery Johnson said he wanted his team to both start and finish games better than it had been.
The Nets started out just fine, ending the first half with a lead for the first time this season.
As for finishing? Not so much.
The Cavaliers dominated the second half, outscoring the Nets 56-33 to send New Jersey to its fourth straight loss, 98-82.
“Hopefully, when we become a good team, we’ll get both of them — a good start and a good finish,” Johnson said.
If that’s the definition of a good team, it wasn’t the Nets last night. After ending the first half with a 49-43 lead, things fell apart in the third quarter when the Cavaliers went on a 15-6 run over the final 6:56.
The Nets managed to cut the Cavs’ lead to two, at 78-76, with just under nine minutes remaining in the fourth on an Anthony Morrow 3-pointer. But from there, the Cavs ended the game on a 20-6 run.
“We avoided a slow start but then we finished bad,” said Deron Williams, who finished with 16 points, four rebounds and five assists in 34:20. “We just need a full 48 minutes of basketball . . . we’re not getting it. I don’t know if we’ve even shot over 40 percent in any game.
“We’re just not getting any easy looks, any easy baskets, and we’re missing a lot of easy ones, too.”
It was a rough second half on both ends of the court for the Nets. They shot just 11-for-31 (35 percent) from the field in the second half, including a dreadful 4-for-15 in the fourth quarter. They also went 2-for-11 in the second half from 3-point range, and finished the game with 22 turnovers.
That, combined with a porous defense that allowed the Cavaliers to go 10-for-12 from 3-point range in the second half and shoot over 50 percent from the field for the second half.
“We had a really good run in the first half, [and] got the ball moving,” Johnson said. “But in the second half, they got hot from the 3-point line . . . they had some guys really struggling from the 3-point line coming into this game, and they caught fire. We didn’t do a good job of running them off the line.”
With so much roster turnover and uncertainty during this season’s truncated training camp, Williams and the Nets entered the season knowing they were bound to get off to a slow start.
But that doesn’t make dropping four in a row any easier for Williams to take. It doesn’t get any easier for the Nets, either, who host the Pacers to cap a six games in eight days stretch to begin the season.
“[We have to] pick up and move on,” he said. “[I’m] definitely frustrated . . . I’m hoping this gets turned around, and we get some wins.”