Yankees
Nets
MEMPHIS –- You wouldn’t think winning two games in a row would be so hard, but look at what the Nets have to go through to put together a single win.
They won Saturday in New York after falling behind by 16 in the first quarter, and were aided mightily by their best 3-point shooting night of the year and the Knicks’ NBA record-setting worst.
It would have taken an even more impressive comeback for the Nets to get their first winning streak and eighth win of the season because of another really slow start. They were down by 21 last night with 25:30 of action left, but in the Nets’ minds, they had Memphis right where they wanted them.
But we’ve all seen it happen so many times: teams fight and scratch and claw to get within a bucket or two and have numerous chances to get over the proverbial hump and can’t. Grizzlies 107, Nets 101 was that game exactly.
This was the fourth consecutive game the Nets were down big early and either needed the bench to lift them, or some super performances, or a ridiculously good –- and bad -– shooting night either to bring them back into the game or to win it. But they can’t keep going at this pace.
“I don’t want to say we can’t,” Devin Harris said. “I think we play better from behind, but we definitely don’t like giving teams head starts the way we’ve been doing. Once we correct that, it will be easy to contend in that fourth quarter instead of coming back from big deficit.”
It sounds easy, but the Nets have shown that it’s not. And with Dallas and Oklahoma City as the next two teams on this trip, the Nets could be staring at huge holes early with slim-to-no chance of recovery.
This was a winnable game from the jump. The Grizzlies were without their All-Star power forward Zach Randolph because of a back injury. The Nets should have been thinking pounce, and it looked at first like they were as they had chances to go up by 10 in the first period but couldn’t convert.
And when the snowball started rolling in the first half, the Nets couldn’t stop it because of poor transition defense, poor halfcourt defense and a poor showing by Brook Lopez. They have been few and far between, but Lopez was a non-factor early. He didn’t grab his first rebound until 5:07 was left in the third and the Nets were down 13.
But Lopez wasn’t the reason the Nets lost. He just had a bad first half and he let some calls affect him on both ends as Marc Gasol exploited him and the Nets for 16 first-half points.
The reason the Nets lost was a collective lack of fight and energy in the first half and then having to expend too much of it late.
Courtney Lee was great again with a career-best 30 points and Harris had 28. But as a team, the Nets missed five layups in the final 7:40 and 15-of-23 shots overall in the fourth period.
“We got good shots,” Harris said. “We had some solid looks. We got to the rim. We had some tough breaks. We couldn’t get the tip-ins. We were right on the edge but we couldn’t get it across.”
That’s what happens often when you fall behind big and come back but never forge ahead. But the Nets have to stop thinking that they have a team right where they want them when they’re behind big. Not every team is the Knicks.
Al Iannazzone covers the Nets for The Record (Bergen County, N.J.)
