There was the rant by Jason Kidd. Then another defeat, perhaps the worst of the season.
Next came an understanding, after an undeniably firm chat, between team president Rod Thorn and Kidd. Then Vince Carter returned from a sprained ankle injury.
And winning followed.
It is only a three-game winning streak the Nets will carry at home tonight against Memphis, but it represents a dramatic turnaround. The Nets were as dead as Julius Caesar after Kidd vented and the Utah Jazz did a collective dance on their skulls. The losses formed a chain of six, with shooting (.366) that would embarrass tree stumps and a scoring average (76.6) that could pass as the halftime norm for Phoenix.
So they beat Portland. Then Seattle. Then, improbably, they rallied from 14 down and snuffed the Lakers, 102-100, Sunday in Los Angeles, with more endgame excitement than the rest of the season combined.
“Biggest win of the season. It shows you the resilience we have,” said Bostjan Nachbar, one of the many heroes in the current winning streak.
“We didn’t want to lose,” Kidd said of the LA comeback. “As a team, we’ve been kicked around early on and we don’t want to be known as a team with a weak jaw in the sense of teams can give us a punch and we just fold.”
Maybe before. That was the whole point of Kidd’s venting – a rant that led to him talking with coach Lawrence Frank and Thorn. The team president was about as happy as he gets when he hears “Alonzo Mourning on line two,” but Thorn spoke to Kidd and said all was well.
“We (the team) didn’t really talk about it,” Nachbar said. “Any time the captain speaks up, it’s a wake-up call. It was for me, and everybody stepped up. And Vince is back.”
Is he ever. Carter simply played three great games off the bench. Kidd and Carter have joked about the bench being a role for the All-Star, but maybe the joking should stop. He supplied a superb stash of offense and got his minutes anyway. He likes the fit.
“It’s something I wanted to do,” Carter said of the bench duty he felt was beneficial for his ankle. “Just want to let my ankle heal. I have a little more time to get it warm. It’s like an old Chevy engine, you’ve got to let it go for a while before you drive it or it’ll cut off.”
Everybody has benefited from Carter’s presence. Consider since Carter has returned, the Nets went from a .390 team shooting percentage to .413 with their three highest field goal totals (36, 39, 35) of the season and their three best game percentages (.537, .494, .467).
Virtually every rotation player has surged. In the three games, Malik Allen has gone from .302 to .391; Josh Boone from .154 to .348; Carter himself from .395 to .459 (he was 18-of-28, .642 in the three games), Richard Jefferson went from .444 to .459 while averaging 29.0 points, Kidd jumped from .342 to .362, Bostjan Nachbar rose from .359 to .392. Only Antoine Wright (.449 to .431) and Sean Williams (.639 to .611) dropped.
Now, the task is to keep it going: “The hardest game is the first game back from the trip,” Frank said.
“We’re starting to get some momentum. We’ve got to go home and protect our home court,” Jefferson said. “We weren’t really looking ahead (to Memphis and Philly), but we understood if we were able to get this win, opportunity was knocking. (LA) was our best game on the road trip because we plodded, we did the things we needed to do, played good team defense.”
And won.