Well, just one night after winning their 14th straight home game and first against the Rockets in 14 tries, you could probably guess that the Nets wouldn’t be full of energy on Wednesday night at MSG against the streaking Knicks. If you guessed that, you’d be right.
Fighting for the No. 8 seed in the Eastern Conference, New York has been playing great basketball as of late and simply crushed a sluggish and lackadaisical Nets team tonight that didn’t seem to care much about winning this game. The Knicks were hot early and rode an important end-of-first-quarter 5-0 run off two Brooklyn turnovers to extend their lead to nine after just 12 minutes of play.
Then, the rout was on. New York, notably J.R., Carmelo Anthony, and Tim Hardaway Jr., started drilling threes in the second quarter, winning the frame by 16 and taking a commanding 63-38 halftime lead that turned out to be totally insurmountable for the Nets, who were without Kevin Garnett (back) and Andrei Kirilenko (ankle) for yet another game.
Brooklyn was able to the cut into its deficit a little bit in the beginning of the second half, but wasn’t able to get it closer than 14 before the Knicks struck back with some more hot shooting, taking a 21-point advantage into a fourth quarter that felt like more of a scrimmage than ESPN-televised game.
Some other observations I had from the game: Not really much to say after as bad a loss as this one other than that the Nets haven’t been the good the whole in the second game of back-to-backs so this (lack of effort) isn’t totally surprising….Brooklyn allowed New York to make 60% of its shots from the field and hit 11 three-pointers. Also, the Nets gave up 41 rebounds and only collected 23 themselves, getting nearly doubled up on the glass….Once again, the Nets took a lot of threes (26) and didn’t make too many of them (eight, so 30.8%)….Joe Johnson led the team in points with 16 but missed too many open shots to be redeemable. No Net stood out as having a good game and when that happens, the team isn’t going to win very many games….Jason Kidd and Joe Johnson both got T’d up tonight. I’ll bet that doesn’t happen again very soon.
Looking Ahead
The Nets have a night off before heading home to play the Detroit Pistons at Barclays before embarking on a three-game road swing.
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