OAKLAND, Calif. — Devin Harris, who had landed hard and sprained his right wrist just three seconds before halftime, stood in the Nets’ locker room making the act of putting on his shirt something as difficult as, well, the Nets’ winning.
Here’s the difference. Harris eventually got his shirt on. And buttoned. Who knows if, when the Nets will win again?
“In the first half, I thought we had momentum,” interim coach Kiki Vandeweghe said. “Devin gets hurt and we just collapse.”
A Nets defeat now comes in the category of “Dog Bites Man,” with the only intrigue being how they did so or what went wrong. So in losing a 10th straight game, 111-79 to the depleted, nine-man, NBA-worst defensive team Warriors here last night and falling to 3-39, the Nets lost Harris and gave themselves their third double-figure losing streak this season, a franchise first in the NBA.
Now 11 teams in NBA history have had three losing streaks of at least 10 games in the same season, two of them with four such streaks.
“You just have to continue to stay positive,” said Courtney Lee (17 points). “Just keep telling yourself it will turn. Just like when you’re shooting, you miss a shot, you just tell yourself the next one is going in. We lose a game, we tell ourselves, the next one we’re going to win.”
They have been telling themselves that lots this season.
Need good news? Harris’ X-rays were negative.
That’s about it. But even he doubts he will be ready for tonight’s road trip-ending expected loss in Utah.
“I’ll say no,” Harris (four points, three assists, 20 minutes) said of his availability for the Jazz game, giving the positive spin as “It’s not broken. . . . I fell on it right before the half. I put my hand out to kind of brace the fall and I think that’s when it happened. It’s just a sprain right now. Hopefully it will not get worse. . . . Everything heals with time.”
More bad news? Andris Biedrins made a free throw with 6:26 left for Golden State. He was 1-of-17 (.059) on the season to that point. Stephen Curry (32 points), Cartier Martin (16 points) and Anthony Tolliver (12 points) all had career highs for the Warriors. Lots of career highs. Oh, that’s right. They were playing the Nets.
Keyon Dooling started the second half in place of Harris, who missed 10 games earlier this season with a strained groin. He had been playing with tendinitis in the wrist for several weeks, aggravated it in New Orleans 15 nights ago and sat the subsequent game in San Antonio. He played five games since, including here, with the wrist taped. Harris came back to the bench with 6:05 left in the third quarter, icing his wrist.
He likely would not have wanted to return — not when he saw the Warriors rip off a 20-6 sledgehammer to close the third quarter and go up, 88-65.
The Warriors tried to even things out with their leading scorer, Monte Ellis, departing early in the third quarter with a sprained right ankle and taking off the remainder of the game. So the Warriors simply turned it into a rout behind Curry and Corey Maggette (29 points), who became the first Warrior to shoot 10 free throws in 11 straight games since Wilt Chamberlain in 1964. The Nets scored 79 points, 21 of them by Brook Lopez.
“When Devin got hurt, it took a little wind out of us and we never recovered,” Lopez said.
Without Harris, it took the Nets less than 3½ minutes to trail by 16, the spread the faced when Curry tripled for a 64-48 Warrior edge.
“Really, you can’t have too many thoughts on tonight,” Vandeweghe said. “This was a team, they were depleted.”
And still kicked the Nets’ butts.