LOS ANGELES – Kerry Kittles is the Nets’ second all-time leading scorer. He’s second in steals, field goals made and minutes played.
And yet all the Nets got for him this past summer was a draft pick. A second-round pick, naturally. With Kittles having some good years left at age 30 and – knee history or not – virtually anyone will second the notion of that trade to the Clippers not going down as one of the great swaps in Net history.
“I have mixed emotions,” said Kittles, one of the victims of the Nets’ summer slice-and-dice financial purge that saved them the last year of his contract at $9.566 million. “I don’t care if I was traded for draft picks or any kind of player. You work so hard to build a respectable organization, and we finally got a team together that was very competitive, a team that a lot of teams in this league feared playing against, and to break it up and for them to not really have that dominant a team right now, it’s a little disheartening.
“But it’s over now,” Kittles concluded, meaning his run with the Nets – but the observation could easily refer to the status of the Nets’ tenure as a power.
Normally, Kittles would have salivated about tonight’s game here against his former team. But Kittles likely will watch in street clothes. After returning to the Clippers for his first game Sunday after summer arthroscopic surgery – the fifth medical procedure on his right knee – Kittles banged his knee Monday at practice. He’s listed as questionable, but highly doubtful is more accurate.
“I could be better. Obviously, everyone knows about the rehab process from the surgery I had this summer, and the knee was responding and feeling pretty good,” said Kittles, who hyperextended the knee when Marko Jaric fell into him. “I suffered a little setback.”
Kittles, though, has been down before. He missed the entire 2000-01 season. Along the way, Kittles underwent microfracture surgery, the same process from which Jason Kidd is now trying to rehab.
The Nets’ summer makeover – or dismantling – has been well-documented and the sum total is a season on the brink of a disaster of biblical proportions. The Nets signed Ron Mercer to replace Kittles. Mercer already has undergone knee surgery. Now Richard Jefferson toils at two.
Kittles was always underrated as a Net. Yeah, he was a streaky shooter. No, he never blossomed into the superstar some hoped he’d become. But as a guy who ran the floor and spotted up, he was the perfect complement to Kidd. And then there was the defense.
“He has the IQ to play defense, period,” praised Clippers coach Mike Dunleavy. “He recognizes things, he sees things . . . He gets in the passing lanes and he understands angles as far as sink and fills, things of that nature.”
Kittles, who went through some hideous losing with the Nets before basking in the Eden of two Finals, remembers both sides.
“I appreciated the winning more than anybody there. More than any fan did, more than any other player did because I was there when we were the doormats,” said Kittles, a career 14.3 ppg scorer. “And to finally have a team . . . we had a roster that top to bottom was pretty damn good. And now to see them struggle as much as they are, and seeing players go in other directions, it’s a little difficult.”
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NETS at CLIPPERS
Tonight 10:30 – TNT; WFAN (660 AM)
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Leaving his mark
A look at Kerry Kittles’ place in the Nets’ record book:
CATEGORY // NO. // RANK
3-pointers // 679 // 1st
Minutes // 16,686 // 2nd
Points // 7,096 // 2nd
Field goals // 2,751 // 2nd
Steals // 803 // 2nd
Games // 496 // 4th
Assists // 1,275 // 7th
Free throws // 907 // 9th
Def. rebounds // 1,439 // 10th