EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- For a half, the Nets didn’t play like a team that should be trying to avoid the NBA’s worst record ever. Their second-half play made it seem unavoidable.

With Devin Harris running the offense beautifully and Brook Lopez dominating inside, the Nets clicked and led by 18 points in the first half. It tied their second-biggest lead of the season.

Naturally, it didn’t last.

The offense stalled. Lopez became the forgotten man and the 18-point lead was gone as quickly as you can say five-and-fifty-one.

Store this 104-94 defeat to Memphis under another game the Nets will rue if they end up matching the 1972-73 Sixers with nine wins or sit alone with eight victories or fewer.

That’s a growing list.

You can throw the prior two in there when they played the Heat with Dwyane Wade on the floor for only seven minutes and the Raptors with Chris Bosh back in Canada.

“I think the last three games we’ve had great chances to win, and we played well enough, at times, to win,” interim coach Kiki Vandeweghe said. “We just have to make sure we understand time and clock and flow of the game.

“All those things go into it, but as I’ve said many times, once you get in the habit of losing, you find a way; once you get in the habit of winning, you find a way. Tonight was a good example of that.”

The truth is in the last 12 games, the Nets played nine that they had a chance to win and they got just two of them. They didn’t come to play twice -- against the Bucks and Raptors -- and in the five other losses the game was right there in the fourth.

The bad habits Vandeweghe talked about are hard to break.

“Sometimes when nobody is looking you can revert back to your bad habits,” Keyon Dooling said. “Unfortunately for us everybody sees when we play well and we just kind of lose it and we go back to our losing habits. As long as we have those losing habits that will pretty much be the outcome for us.”

In this game, the Nets stopped going to Lopez and decided the best shot was from the perimeter. They must have forgotten they rank 30th in field goal percentage.

Lopez had 22 points at the break. He finished with 26. Overall, thirty-nine of the 87 shots the Nets took were outside the paint. They hit 13 of them. They were 4-of-21 from three. They’re next-to-last from downtown.

Too often they have players going for the home run instead of working for the best shot, especially when a team makes a run. They try to get it back with one three-pointer. They took 10 in the fourth period.

“When we talked after the game," Vandeweghe said, “we talked about two things, really: when you have a team down, staying with what got you there, which was pressure defense, sharing the ball and going inside. We started going away from that, and they got the lead down to 11 [by halftime].

“When you’ve got a team down like that, that’s when you’ve got to put the pedal to the metal and really end the game.

“Then the second thing is, it’s a six-point game with a couple minutes left, and we took long outside shots, early in the shot clock. We just didn’t need to do that. That’s when you grind it out, that’s when you take the ball to the basket. We just have to learn that’s what you do.”

You would think the Nets would know it by now, but that’s why they have just five wins and are flirting with history.

Al Iannazzone covers the Nets for the Record (Bergen County, N.J.).