There are nights like this for any team with a championship ambition, nights when the most basic of all competitive elements are on display. The Nets lately looked confused. They seemed disinterested. It’s a long season. The spasms of bad basketball are inevitable. But if you are equal in your reputation, these things must pass.
They had lost three games in a row and looked horrible in doing so. They came from a terrible defeat in Detroit to a Pistons team that some nights seemed to be already playing out. They have been the worst type of attackers: at the top of their game against incredible teams, lowering themselves to the scum level of smaller teams.
This was the message Steve Nash had for his players before taking on the Pacers at the Barclays Center on Wednesday night in their last game before heading west for what should have been a terribly interesting five-game trip:
“You can’t have fun the way you’re playing.”
Thus, the Nets had fun on Wednesday night, certainly for a first part where they not only punched the Pacers, but also erased any trace of the game’s imagination. There was a 32-5 streak that closed the time that didn’t really end until two minutes passed in the third quarter, the fanfare had increased to 39-8 and the score was a ridiculous 69-33.
You play well over a long period of time, it hardly matters that the Nets spent most of the second half reclining on lounge chairs, allowing the Pacers to beat them 61-35 the rest of the way. A victory is a victory. This was 104-94. This made them feel happy and much better about themselves.
And when they pass through San Francisco, Sacramento, Phoenix and Los Angeles (for a super interesting two-stage with the Lakers and Clippers), they will meet Kevin Durant, they will be whole and they can get back to work to maximize their fun.
“You could tell from the beginning that they were in prison,” said Nash, “and when they are in prison you can see what they are capable of.”
It certainly helped that the Pacers played the first half as a team that was introduced to each other during the throw-in, but with all the credit to Nets, who were losing Durant and didn’t necessarily receive offensive efforts A- plus the other two-thirds of his terrible troika, Kyrie Irving and James Harden (although combined the two were a surprising 27-to-27 of the line).
No, during the stretch that went around the game they played the way they always do when times are good: with an effortless smoothness that plagues the basketball purist at all. Even without Durant, there is so much basketball skill on display when things are going on, which is probably what makes it twice as annoying when things go the other way.
The Nets, of course, took some time off. One is natural: the length of the NBA season, even one truncated by 10 games, will allow them plenty of time to figure things out. A little less than two-thirds of a season still remains.
The other is a little more surprising: despite the Nets’ pedestrian record of 15-12, they are still solidly in third place in the Eastern Conference, where only 76ers (18-7) and Bucks (16-8) entered the Wednesday’s game at the Suns) jumped to better-than-average season starts.
“The communication was there, the effort was there, we didn’t play a defense like that all season,” said Joe Harris, who added 17 points. “It’s definitely good to see us take a step in the right direction.”
The Nets understand all of this perfectly well, of course. They know how much they are under scrutiny and seem to greet you, even if it means regularly recognizing your shortcomings. Jeff Green chatted with his teammates after Tuesday’s confusion in Motor City and, while it may not have been a full sermon on coming to Jesus, he touched on a common point: a good team that doesn’t play well is painful for see yourself.
But the one who does?
For a long stretch of Wednesday night, we saw what it was like. Choose your adjective: exciting, dazzling, stimulating. As the Nets do their show on the road, they hope to be able to add a few more to that pile, rather than the other, which includes: Frustrating. Enigmatic. Exasperating.