With Deron Williams once again sidelined with a sprained ankle, Nets coach Jason Kidd had a message for Joe Johnson before Monday’s game against the Hawks in Brooklyn.
“Jason told me I was going to have to pick it up,” said Johnson, who entered Monday riding a streak of five straight games scoring in single digits, “and he told me in the fourth quarter when I came back in that he wanted me to be very assertive and make plays and kind of take over the game. That’s just what I was trying to do.”
Johnson managed to do just that, scoring nine of his team-high 23 points in the fourth quarter to lead the Nets to a 91-86 win over the Hawksin front of 15,326 inside Barclays Center.
With the win, the Nets now have their second three-game winning streak of the season, one which they’ll try to stretch to four games Wednesday when they host Golden State.
“Winning kind of cures all.,” Johnson said. “We’re riding a three-game winning streak, hopefully it continues. We just have to keep working hard and just stay focused more than anything. We’ve just got to keep building on this.”
It had seemed like the Nets might fail to capitalize on the momentum they generated with wins in Oklahoma City on Thursday and back home against Cleveland on Saturday when Kidd announced before the game Williams would be sidelined for his 12th game of the season because of his perpetually sprained left ankle.
But Johnson came to the rescue, overcoming a recent cold streak and putting his team on his back in the fourth quarter. After checking back in with 6:54 remaining, Johnson hit a 3-pointer to put the Nets ahead for good at 80-78, then added a couple of jumpers before hitting Mirza Teletovic with a pass for a corner 3-pointer to give the Nets an 89-84 lead with 44.6 seconds left that salted away the game.
“We call him Joe Jesus,” said Kevin Garnett. “He might not be there when you call him but he’s there when you need him.”
The combination of Johnson, Teletovic and Alan Anderson — who started in place of Williams — scored 24 of the Nets’ 26 points in the third quarter, including eight straight from Anderson that capped a 14-0 run to open the second half and give the Nets a 60-52 lead.
“We know third quarters are sometimes our weak spots in the game, so we just wanted to come out and be aggressive,” said Anderson, who finished with 14 points. “We knew we kind of let up a bit in that second quarter going into halftime, and we just wanted to be aggressive.”
“We knew they were going to come out [hard] and we’d have to take their first punch, which we did, and we threw some more punches.”
Atlanta eventually battled back, however, taking a 78-77 lead midway through the fourth on a breakaway dunk by DeMarre Carroll following a Paul Pierce turnover.
But the Nets immediately responded with a Johnson 3-pointer and a breakaway dunk for Shaun Livingston after a Kyle Korver turnover to take an 82-78 they’d never relinquish.
“This group is playing with a lot of energy,” Kidd said. “The guys stayed together. We went into halftime down, and we came out and went on a run.”
With games at home against Golden State and Miami and in Toronto on tap this week before next week’s trip to London, the Nets still have plenty of work to do if they want to turn this brief run into something that can finally get their season turned around.
But they are still undefeated in 2014, and seem to be believing that turning the page on the calendar could be what has given them the fresh start they needed.
“We’re starting to obviously play better,” Garnett said. “Confidence is building. Morale is high, obviously. But through the cases of when we have guys out, and that being Deron [this time], everybody knows they have to pick it up a little bit.
“Since the New Year we’ve obviously tried to turn this thing around, not just from an effort standpoint, but [from an] each other standpoint. It started in [Oklahoma City]. … You started to see guys playing for one another.”
Through three games, they’ve managed to do it. Now we’ll see if they can sustain it.