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| For some reason, MarShon Brooks only played two minutes tonight, in a game the Nets desperately needed scoring in, which could easily be brought to the table by MarShon. I'm getting sick and tired of the awful way in which Avery Johnson runs his rotations |
Well, that was ugly and nowhere near as close as I thought it would be. The Nets fell to 2-8 in their last 10 games with a putrid effort tonight against the Knicks, who improved to 11-1 at MSG on this young season. There's really not much more to say about this game other than that it followed the pattern for Nets excrutiating losses: close first half, dreadful third quarter, nonexistent interior and perimeter defense, copius amounts of isolations, and horrendous shot selection. Oh, and I forgot about lack of shot-clock awareness.
Keith Bogans, Brook, and D-Will actually played well and Joe Johnson would have been fine had he made more than five of the 14 shots he took. Bogans started the game hot, scoring nine quick points on 3-3 shooting from beyond the arc but cooled off soon after his initial outburst, taking some badly ill-advised shots later in the game when the Nets needed a good possession. Brook's mobility still hasn't seemed to regroup to 100 percent yet after his foot sprain but he did manage a double-double tonight. However, his defense was simply dreadful as nearly every pick-and-roll the Knicks ran, he bit on and allowed Tyson Chandler to slip to the hoop for one of many alley-oop dunks. Deron committed five turnovers and had a -19, but hit 7 of 12 shots and scored 16 points and nabbed 10 dimes.
My main problem with this game, however, wasn't the Nets' 12 turnovers, sub-45 percent shooting, nine free throw attempts, or even any combination of those. It was that they seemed to give up in the fourth quarter, a quarter which they were only down eight points at the beginning of. I know it's a harsh accusation to make, but when all they did that period was settle for low percentage jumpers, not play any defense at all, not hustle, or even have any offensive discipline at all. When you are 2-7 coming into a game with a rival–THAT PLAYS IN THE SAME DAMN CITY AS YOU–you have to give it your all for the ENTIRE GAME, not just portions of it where convienient.
This has seemed like an issue a lot for this team of when it gets into long stretches of important game where it falls apart, for lack of a better term. Give a lot of credit to the Knicks who didn't miss much at all in the second half but the Nets lost this game, hands down. After putting up an awful 33-point second half against the Jazz, Brooklyn scored just 38 points in the third and fourth quarters tonight, yet another demonstration of how shockingly bad they are consistently in the second half when viewed as relative to their normal first half performance.
Some other observations I had from the game: Mentioned this above, but I'm constantly stunned at how inconsistent and confusing Avery's usage of the Nets bench has become. Reggie Evans, in a game where we needed intensity and interior defensive presence, only played 10 minutes and MarShon Brooks, in a game where the Nets needed points desperately, only played two minutes of garbage time after the game was already decided…..Kris Humphries grabbed nine boards but didn't score a point. Played much better than box score would suggest but didn't bring enough stopping power in the paint to keep up with Chandler…..The Nets are being too passive with the ball and are trying to get the perfect shot attempt way too often and it's costing them possessions and some shot-clock violations. Joe Johnson and Blatche, surprisingly, have been two major culprits of this in the last few games as they have gotten the ball down low, contested, by the hoop a few times but have passed out in hopes of a higher percentage shot that would never come. Gerald Wallace has done this a lot too.
Looking Ahead
The Nets have three days off to contemplate their last three losses until they play the 76ers, for the first time this year, at the Barclays Center.
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