NBA

Despite late rally, Nets fail to ground Rockets

The Nets kept making runs in the second half Friday night. But every time they did, the Rockets had an answer.

More to the point, they had James Harden.

Harden scored 15 of his 22 points in the second half to help the Rockets hold off several Nets rallies down the stretch and emerge with a 106-96 victory in front of a sellout crowd of 17,732 at Barclays Center.

“We made a few runs, and just didn’t get over the hump,” said Brook Lopez, who finished with 27 points and looked like an All-Star for the first time since coming back from All-Star weekend in Houston. “We were right there.”

With Joe Johnson sidelined for the first time this season with plantar fasciaitis in his left foot, the Nets were without their closer. But as Johnson sat on the bench, he watched his teammates make a spirited run in the fourth quarter — after falling behind by 15 — to cut the deficit to three at 97-94 with 2:57 left on a Mirza Teletovic 3-pointer.

But without Johnson to bail out the Nets, it was the Rockets who made all of the big plays down the stretch. Carlos Delfino, who also scored 22 points for Houston, drained a 3-pointer and a long two on back-to-back possessions. Harden then officially ended the game with his 3-pointer over the outstretched arm of Keith Bogans with 39.8 seconds left that put the Rockets up 105-96, gave Houston its 13th consecutive victory over the Nets and sent the capacity crowd heading to the exits.

“[Harden] had a little bit of an off-night,” said Deron Williams, who finished with 15 points and 13 assists after getting cortisone shots in both of his ailing ankles Thursday. “I think we did a good job defending him and holding him down. But they had a lot of other guys step up, like Carlos Delfino, who came up with some big plays.”

Delfino, who was starting at power forward after Houston traded both of their power forwards away before Thursday’s trade deadline, gave the Nets fits offensively all night, as the Rockets’ used their speed and quickness to give the Nets’ bigger and slower lineup — and particularly power forward Reggie Evans — all kinds of trouble. That led to the Rockets shooting the lights out in the first half — hitting 58 percent of their shots from the field and 53 percent from 3-point range — to head into halftime with a 61-53 lead.

The Nets kept battling back, but they clearly missed Johnson, who has bailed them out time and again this season when they needed a big shot late in close games. Every time the Nets managed to get within a basket in the second half, the Rockets would respond with a run of their own.

That was particularly true in the fourth, when the Nets went 3-for-11 from 3-point range and failed on multiple occasions to take advantage of opportunities to tie the game.

“We miss Joe a lot,” said Gerald Wallace. “Joe’s obviously a key to our offense, and he creates so much offense not only for himself, but everybody else … but tonight, we just didn’t hit shots.”

The Nets fell into that initial hole in the first half thanks in large part to failures in their pick-and-roll defense. The combination of Houston’s outside shooting — the Rockets went 8-for-15 from deep in the first half — and miscommunications on the responsibilities for the roll man defensively left the Nets giving up one wide-open dunk after another.

“When you start off and you rotate and your guy hits a three, guys start to get frustrated,” Wallace said, “and you’re like, ‘I’m not going to leave my guy and let him hit another three.’ … That just took us out of our rotations and they were going down the lane and dunking the ball.”

But despite their attempts to rally late, the Nets couldn’t make enough plays when it counted, something that hasn’t been an issue when Johnson has been at their disposal.

“The way we played the second half is the way we need to play the whole game,” Bogans said. “We fought, we played defense, we got stops … it was just that stretch at the end where we didn’t make shots.”

tbontemps@nypost.com