It took them awhile — nearly four months, in fact — but the Nets are finally back to .500.
Behind 20 points from Deron Williams and an excellent all-around performance from Paul Pierce, the Nets returned to Barclays Center for the first time in almost three weeks and beat the Bulls Monday night, 96-80, climbing back to .500 for the first time since they were 2-2 on Nov. 5.
“We can’t rest right there,” said Pierce of reaching the .500 mark. “That’s the key. We hit a benchmark we’ve been fighting for all season, and now it’s time to surpass that.
“Hopefully we can feed off of that, continue to grow as a team. The playoffs are right around the corner. … Right now is the time to be playing well, and continue to play better than .500 basketball.”
It was a comprehensive victory for the Nets (29-29), who led wire-to-wire against a Bulls team that had easily beaten them in the first two meetings this season, including a 17-point win on Christmas Day in Brooklyn and a 16-point win over the Nets in Chicago on Feb. 13, the final game before the All-Star break.
That, combined with Chicago’s dismissal of the Nets in the first round of last year’s playoffs, gave the Nets plenty of motivation.
“This is a big win for us,” said Pierce, who finished with 14 points, seven rebounds, five assists and four steals while doing an excellent job defending against Chicago’s much bigger pair of power forwards, Carlos Boozer and Taj Gibson. “Mentally, the Bulls have really had our number. To be honest, if I was them, I would feel like when they come play the Nets they feel like they can beat us anytime.
“I feel like the guys had pride tonight to say, ‘We’re tired of getting pushed around by the Bulls.’ We decided we wanted to take the fight to the Bulls and be the aggressors first, because usually it’s been the opposite.”
The Nets certainly did that, jumping out to an 8-0 lead and never looking back, with a defense that forced Chicago into 28 turnovers, including a season-high 19 steals. Although the Nets were outrebounded 43-28 by the Bulls, the fact they forced so many turnovers — which led to 30 points — allowed them to counterbalance Chicago’s advantage in the paint.
“Our defense tonight was big,” coach Jason Kidd said. “They might be a little bigger than us, but guys were helping each other on post-ups, getting deflections, and that’s a big part of why we won.”
The Nets opened up a 15-point lead late in the first quarter and a 17-point lead by the end of the third, only to have the Bulls respond both times, cutting the Nets’ lead to three late in the second quarter and to nine midway through the fourth.
But, both times, the Nets were able to respond to Chicago’s surges with runs of their own. In the second, Joe Johnson — who snapped out of a recent shooting funk to go 7-for-11 and finish with 19 points — scoring the half’s final seven points to give the Nets a 50-42 halftime lead, while Williams began an 8-0 run that put away the game in the fourth with a 3-pointer. That was followed by an Andrei Kirilenko dunk and a Pierce 3-pointer that pushed Brooklyn’s lead back to 17 and began the victory celebration.
“I just thought we played with a fire we don’t always play with,” Pierce said. “I told the guys, ‘If we can play like that for the rest of the season, we’re a tough team to beat.’
“We’ve just got to play with a high intensity night in and night out, and just play for one another. That’s what you saw tonight.”
Now the Nets head into Wednesday’s game in Brooklyn against Memphis with a chance to do something they haven’t all season long — get themselves over .500. But in order to do that, they had to finally get back there, something they finally achieved Monday.
“It means a lot,” Johnson said of getting back to .500. “We have overcome a lot this season. To be at .500 at this point, hopefully we can keep climbing, keep building and try to become a better team.”