THE Nets will remember this game, and this week, and this stretch of lousy basketball that has interrupted their merry march toward the spring. For now, it’s easiest to shrug these losses aside, to minimize the way the 76ers hammered them yesterday, to write off these post-All-Star-break blahs to the vagaries of a long season.
Down the road, it won’t be so simple. Down the road, when they are facing a Game 7 inside the Palace at Auburn Hills, or inside Conseco Field House, they’ll remember these frosty February nights when they could have done something about it and chose not to.
“Those are the things you worry about when you’re on a beach somewhere,” Jason Kidd said, maybe half an hour after the Sixers had drilled the Nets 90-83 at the Meadowlands, their third loss in four games since the All-Star intermission. “We have to get back to playing with a chip on our shoulders.”
It had better happen soon, or else that first outing to the shore could happen a lot quicker than expected. The Pacers aren’t going away. The Pistons aren’t going away. And despite the dreadful display they treated the home folks to yesterday, the Nets are a significantly better team in East Rutherford than they are anywhere else on the planet. If ever a team needed to assure home court advantage for as long as the law allows, it’s the Nets.
Especially these Nets. Because the days are long gone when the Nets could simply enjoy what Pat Riley used to call an “innocent climb,” grateful for whatever nuggets of prosperity trickle their way. Maybe that would have been good enough last season.
Not this time. Not this year. Not with a roster that was supposed to be designed for right here, right now, for one more magnificent rush toward the NBA Finals. A team on the come can afford a few hiccups here and a few flat tires there, a few nights when the magnitude of the mission overwhelms them.
A team on the cusp cannot.
“You would think we would have the maturity to avoid something like this, given that we went through everything we went through last year,” Nets coach Byron Scott said. “Obviously, we don’t always have that. Something’s missing.”
In truth, something has been missing almost from the start of the season, and it’s entirely a credit to Kidd – who has had a virtuoso year that might actually dwarf his bravura performance of 2001-02 – that at 35-18 they are only one game behind last season’s record after 53 games.
The Nets kept winning despite missing Dikembe Mutombo, their key offseason acquisition; despite not yet adequately replacing all the intangibles that the much-scorned Keith Van Horn brought to last year’s team (Richard Jefferson isn’t his equal on the boards and Rodney Rogers isn’t even close from beyond the arc); and despite the fact that Chris Childs still looks like he is keeping the Cheesecake Factory afloat all by himself.
The strain is evident in Kidd’s face and in his words – “Winning isn’t easy; losing is easy,” he said – and in the way the Nets have struggled to maintain their focus and their concentration less than a year after winning the East precisely because they were the most professional team in the conference.
“Every team goes through dry spots,” Jefferson said. “This is just our time.”
It’s true that the Nets are right in the middle of the NBA Sahara, the playoffs still so far off in the future they might as well start in July. Every week brings an endless supply of seemingly meaningless games; there is nothing more mind-numbing than the thought of having to play the Memphis Grizzlies.
Yet there is nothing more potentially devastating to a championship-caliber team’s long-term ambitions than sleep-walking through those games, as the Nets did last Wednesday, or meekly surrendering what should have been a routine Sunday-afternoon romp, as they did yesterday.
“Hey,” Kidd said, hopefully, “even the Lakers have had their troubles this year.”
But Kidd knows that the Nets are not the Lakers; they do not have years of tradition and a neat row of NBA Finals Trophies lining their office complex. They will scare nobody just by showing up in these playoffs, unless they get to show up at the Meadowlands, preferably in a Game 7.
For these Nets, that isn’t just a suggestion, it’s a requirement. And if it doesn’t happen, they’ll know exactly why.