AUBURN HILLS, Mich. — Kevin Garnett watched the Nets play the Pistons Friday night from back in New York, after coach Jason Kidd decided to give him the night off.
The Nets who did make the trip to Michigan played as if they would rather have been sitting next to Garnett.
Playing with no energy from the opening tip, the Nets were destroyed by the Pistons, 111-95, in front of a few handfuls of fans at The Palace of Auburn Hills. The Nets were abused inside at both ends by the Pistons while looking utterly lost offensively.
It was bad enough Kidd opted to pull the plug on his entire starting lineup for the rest of the game less than five minutes into the second half. After calling a timeout following back-to-back 3-pointers from Detroit’s Brandon Jennings that made it 84-55 Pistons with 7:28 remaining in the third, Kidd put in his bench players for the remainder of the game, with none of the starters ever returning and Andrei Kirilenko never getting off the bench at all after halftime.
For the Nets (22-26), who are now 12-5 since the start of 2014, the loss meant they can’t reach .500 in their final three games before the All-Star break, something Paul Pierce had said earlier this week was a team goal.
“That’s something I think those guys in the locker room have talked about,” Kidd said before the game. “For us, it’s just taking one game at a time and putting ourselves in a position to win. But I think that’s a goal we would all like to achieve.”
Instead, Friday night’s performance was a reminder of how awful the Nets looked during their horrific opening two months of the season. Detroit (20-29), which has now swept the season series with the Nets, took advantage of its massive frontline of Josh Smith, Greg Monroe and Andre Drummond, with all three of them having their way in the paint.
The Pistons enjoyed a 57-40 rebounding advantage and shot more than 51 percent from the field, while the Nets were horrendous offensively. After taking a 12-10 lead early in the first quarter, Detroit finished the quarter on a 20-5 run as the Nets went just 6-for-24 (25 percent) from the field, 1-for-9 (11.1 percent) from 3-point range and had just one assist.
Things didn’t get much better in the second, with the Pistons — who came into the game with the 20th-ranked offense in the NBA on a per-possession basis — scoring an absurd 67 points on 61.7 percent shooting to go into halftime with a 67-44 lead. The Nets, on the other hand, often found themselves forcing up contested one-on-one shots. When they managed open looks, they missed them more often than not, finishing the half shooting 31 percent with five assists on their 15 made baskets.
Some meaningless production from the bench after the outcome was assured made the final numbers appear closer than they should have been, as Detroit — which had entered this game with losses in six of its last eight games — looked like the team that had turned it around in 2014, while the Nets looked completely inept in all phases of the game.