One could say that after their abysmal 10-21 start to the 2013-14 season, just making the playoffs would be a positive for the new-look Nets. Brooklyn, in fact, blew away those prior notions by going 34-17 since then and obtaining the Eastern Conference’s No. 6 seed, matching them up with the upstart Toronto Raptors in the 1st round.
Toronto, a mostly young team under Dwane Casey, wasn’t widely expected to contend for the Atlantic Division crown before this season began. The Raptors, behind a career season from surprise All-Star snub Kyle Lowry, exceeded those expectations greatly and finished the season at 14 games over .500 with a very solid 48-34 record.
With their last-day-of-season loss to the Cavaliers, the Nets clinched the 6 seed and a series meeting with the Raptors, a team that is much younger and more athletic than Brooklyn. All things considered, it’s probably better for the Nets that they are playing Toronto rather than the Bulls, who knocked them out of the playoffs last year, but the Raptors are no pushover at all.
Still, if the Nets were to lose–for the second season in a row–in the opening round of the postseason without advancing any further, it would be a major disappointment. General manager Billy King constructed the team with the highest payroll in league history this summer, and for it to fail to win a single playoff series would be worse than an embarrassment: It would be a nightmare.
A nightmare for Jason Kidd, who have developed vastly as a coach this year and deserves a series win for the adjustments he has made win an injury-plagued, older squad. A nightmare for King, who took a lot of leaps and risks with his player management to build this roster. A nightmare for the players, especially for the end-of-the-line Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, who don’t have many playoff runs left in them. And finally, a nightmare for the fans, who have filled up Barclays this year and have invested a lot of time, energy, and money to see a winning team.
You can be sure that all of the Nets have no intention of exiting the playoffs after just one series, but it still should be noted that the Raptors do present some matchup and athletic problems for the older Brooklyn team. Players like Lowry (28 years old) , DeMar DeRozan (24) , Terrence Ross (23), Amir Johnson (26), Jonas Valanciunas (21), and others, are all players under the age of 30 who can get up and down the court very fast and play much of the game above the rim.
On the other hand, Brooklyn plays a slower pace of basketball, even though the Nets do get on the fast break from time to time. The youngest Nets starter, Shaun Livingston, is the same age (28) as the Raptors’ oldest starter, Lowry, demonstrating the extreme age differential between these two squads. Brooklyn’s main advantage over Toronto is their size and how Jason Kidd’s “long-ball” strategy employs it effectively.
With all of that said, this series is not going to be an easy one for the Nets, and is relatively likely to go past five games and probably will be decided in six or seven.
It will be difficult for Brooklyn to keep up the intensity, effort, and energy needed to stave off a playoff-hungry team like the Raptors in order to obtain the necessary four wins. However, Billy King didn’t put this team together to try hard but end up losing in the 1st round; he did it to construct a winner, and to get anything less than that would be nothing more than a failure.
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