Here on Brooklyn Balling, I’ll try to recap the chaos that was the 2013-14 Nets season with a series of “Season Review” posts on the players, trades, and even coach that shaped how this year turned out. Andray Blatche was last, and Mirza Teletovic is up next.
Mirza Teletovic, who the Nets signed to a three-year deal before the 2012-13 season, may have been the most improved Net from last season to this one, as he went from being a lightly-used, end-of-the-bench shooting specialist to a crucial reserve who was key in the playoffs and showed off how he can do much more on a basketball court than just shoot threes.
After playing in just 53 games, averaging 9.4 minutes and 3.5 points per on 38% field goal shooting and 34% three-point shooting, Mirza was really ineffective in his first year of North American play, as the Bosnian star struggled off the bat. He was never able to really get on track on a Nets team that had a great regular season but weak postseason.
He played just one minute out of all seven of Brooklyn’s playoff games in the 2013 postseason and didn’t even take a single shot as the Nets were eliminated in the first round by the Bulls. This postseason, however, he averaged 18.3 minutes per playoff contest (220 minutes overall in 12 games) and was a big reason the Nets were able to hold off the Raptors and compete with the Heat.
Mirza may not have been consistent in the regular season or playoffs with his scoring and shooting accuracy, but here and there he would explode from three and put up huge point numbers, such as when he scored a season-high 34 on 7-for-11 shooting from deep in a Jan. 24th win over the Mavericks. Dallas, like with many teams when Mirza is hot, had no way to stop him and could only watch as he hit long ball after long ball to lead Brooklyn to a victory.
This trend of Mirza coming up big in big Nets wins kind of faded into the postseason though, as just one of his five double-digit scoring playoff games came in a Brooklyn win (12 points in the Game 3 win over Miami). In fact, in the Nets’ four other postseason victories, Mirza put up just nine total points for an average of slightly more than two points per contest. Clearly, this demonstrates that Mirza didn’t do much in Nets playoff wins but was able to keep them close in losses.
What does all of this tell us? That MT3, as Nets fans have begun to affectionately call him, is a pretty talented scorer who has yet to fully figure out what role he plays in the NBA. There was that incident from earlier this year in which Mirza loudly pronounced that he wasn’t sure what his purpose on the Nets was. As the season progressed, he seemed to find himself more and more.
However, according to the game-by-game stats and less-than-stellar playoff numbers–albeit improvements over the year before–he still has a lot of work to do to get to the place the Nets would like for him to be at. Good thing he’s under contract for next season as well, so he’s definitely going to be around for another year, something that can’t definitively be said for all of his teammates.
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