The Nets caught a break Thursday night when Kristaps Porzingis, the Knicks’ shot-blocking star, left early in the second half. But they couldn’t buy a shot, and couldn’t cash in.
The Nets kept settling for long jumpers, and kept missing them, falling 111-104 before a sellout crowd of 17,732 at Barclays Center.
“I think a lot of guys had good looks, but we did kind of settle and not attack the goal,” forward DeMarre Carroll said. “We’ve got to mix it up. We can’t just settle for 3s, 3s when we don’t have it going.”
Oh, the Nets surely didn’t have it going. They had won three of four and five of eight coming in, but went deep-space cold.
“When you don’t make shots, hindsight is 20/20,” Spencer Dinwiddie said.
It doesn’t take perfect vision to see they should have taken advantage of Porzingis’ absence to drive the ball rather than settle — and get smothered. The Nets shot 12-of-42 from 3-point range, and heaved up 22 from behind the arc after the break despite Porzingis logging just 2:35 in the second half before getting hurt.
“Obviously we didn’t shoot it well, but credit to their defense,” Nets coach Kenny Atkinson said. “I thought a lot of our shots were contested. They were running us off the line and we were shooting those pull-ups off the dribble, which are much tougher shots. But I think they did a good job of contesting the 3-point line.
“I thought we could have drove it more. I don’t know what our drive numbers were. I don’t think we got to the rim enough, especially when Porzingis went out. We should have been at the rim more.”
Allen Crabbe, who was the second-most accurate 3-point shooter in the NBA last season, clearly is out of sorts. He played through a knee injury that had him listed as questionable, but had just four points and shot 1-for-7 from 3-point range (1-for-8 overall). His Knicks counterpart, Courtney Lee (a former Net), had a game-high 27 points.
“The ball’s just not going in for us right now. It’s just one of those stretches.… We’ll be better,” said Crabbe, who is 4-of-21 from deep in his past two games. “We just couldn’t make the plays down the stretch we needed to make.”