Here are my three thoughts on the Nets’ 91-86 victory over the Hawks in Brooklyn Monday night:
1. The Nets winning their third game in a row — continuing their second multi-game winning streak of the season and matching their season high — was nice, but it was far from the biggest news surrounding the team. That came Monday morning, when coach Jason Kidd announced Deron Williams had his left ankle swell up following Sunday’s practice and was headed to see doctors for “precautionary reasons” Monday afternoon. That news was followed by Kidd announcing before the game that Williams would be sitting out with a sprained left ankle, and the star point guard would be re-evaluated Tuesday.
Tuesday afternoon, the Nets announced Williams had been treated with a cortisone shot and platelet rich plasma injections in both of his ankles. He now has missed 12 regular-season games with the injury after being diagnosed with a sprained left ankle three separate times. He also sprained his right ankle in a workout in Utah in September, which caused him to miss all of the preseason besides a brief cameo in the preseason finale in Miami a few days before the start of the regular season.
This now marks at least the fourth time Williams has received a cortisone shot in both ankles since the start of last season, and the second time he’s undergone platelet rich plasma treatment in both. If you want to look for a silver lining in all of this, you can say Williams went from being an ordinary player before undergoing the PRP treatment shortly before the All-Star Break last season (16.7 points and 7.8 assists on 41.3 percent shooting overall and 34.7 percent shooting from 3-point range) to looking like a superstar again afterwards (22.9 points and 8.0 assists while shooting 48.1 percent from the field and 42 percent from 3-point range).
But any silver lining can’t overshadow the undeniable truth about the Nets moving forward: This franchise has tied its future to a point guard with perpetually troublesome ankles and a center with a perpetually injured right foot. Williams and Brook Lopez were supposed to be the young, star players that the Nets were going to build around for the next 3-5 years. That was why the Nets were willing to give up so many draft picks to acquire Joe Johnson, Gerald Wallace, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce — because they had two of the top 25 players in the game in their primes to surround with veterans to help them win now.
Instead, with Lopez out for the season after undergoing his third surgery in two years on his right foot and Williams once again trying to recover from ankle issues, you have to wonder if either will ever be able to carry the load they were expected to for the Nets. And if you’re the Nets, it’s also time to start wondering if you can afford to wait and see if they ever will be able to do so.
2. Speaking of Kidd, he took a gamble down the stretch of Monday night’s game, removing Paul Pierce from the game and leaving Mirza Teletovic on the floor. From a performance standpoint, you could understand why Kidd did so: Pierce hadn’t scored since putting up nine points in the first quarter, and Teletovic had hit three 3-pointers in the third to help turn the game around. But, at the same time, if the Nets had failed to win Monday’s game, one of the first questions Kidd undoubtedly would have been asked would have been why he chose to go away from Pierce, long considered one of the league’s big-moment players, in the game’s final minutes.
But his faith in Teletovic was rewarded when the Bosnian power forward drained the game’s biggest shot with 44.6 seconds left, giving the Nets a five-point lead that proved to be the winning margin. Teletovic quickly has become a player Kidd trusts, and he has taken advantage of his opportunities to play in the absence of Lopez and Andray Blatche, who missed four games for personal reasons last week.
“That’s what he does,” Kidd said of Teletovic knocking down big shots. “We’ve always counted on him to be able to knock down the 3, and tonight he did that for us.”
With Lopez out for the season, Teletovic seems locked into a spot in the rotation regardless of whether the Nets go big or small.
3. It’s certainly been an up-and-down season for Shaun Livingston. The backup point guard to Williams has gone from playing excellent basketball through the first 10 games to struggling through the next 13 to playing well again for the last 11. Livingston recently admitted he initially was fatigued by the initial jump in minutes after Williams first went down with his sprained left ankle, and getting fatigued also led to him losing confidence at the offensive end.
But Livingston has regained that confidence, and has done a very nice job of both attacking the rim on offense and using his length on defense to bother opposing wings during the team’s three-game winning streak, specifically against Thunder star Kevin Durant last Thursday and Hawks sharpshooter Kyle Korver in Monday’s win.
With the many offensive weapons the Nets have on their roster — even with Williams and Lopez both sidelined — they don’t need Livingston to fill the scoring void in Williams’ absence. They just need him to continue to be an excellent passer and to be aggressive enough offensively to merit attention. If he does that, the Nets will be more than happy with him as a fill-in until Williams is ready to return.