Last season, the Nets’ offense devolved into a hybrid of pickup at Rucker Park and an AND1 mixtape.
Now they’re trying to grow from clear-outs by great players to actually playing great basketball.
“Ball movement. Ball movement,” Kyrie Irving said of the Nets’ new mantra. “You look at some of our possessions last year, it was a lot of one-on-one. You guys talked about it often and we were well aware of it that that offense when the ball sticks it’s just not the greatest brand of basketball you can play.
“We’re giving the defense some nights off when we just go one-on-one. … [There] can be a time and place when we utilize that, but right now having Ben [Simmons] be one of our lead guards and him getting up and down the court, the ball’s hopping, it feels good. Everybody feels good, that’s all that matters.”
Granted, any team with Irving and Kevin Durant is going lean on their isolation brilliance; and the Nets even had iso king James Harden for half of last season. But all of last season was a constant shuffling of lineups, from the unvaccinated Irving’s absence to Harden forcing a trade to Joe Harris’ ankle injury.
The excuses are gone now. As the Nets hope will be their disjointed attack.
New assistant Igor Kokoskov — replacing departed Jordan Ott as offensive coordinator — spent a year as Phoenix head coach and five more as a Suns assistant. He’s been an invaluable aid to Steve Nash, whom he had coached from 2008-12.
“We go back a ways. We worked together in Phoenix for four years,” Nash said. “He helped me in the summer really plan and organize how we want to disseminate our sets and our actions and implement them. He’s been fantastic helping me get clarity and organization and bounce ideas off him and start to build something. We’ve had such disparate teams throughout the last couple of years, it’s been really hard.
“Last year was such a challenge for us with the different teams: With James, without James, no Joe, obviously Kevin got hurt, Kyrie not getting the vaccine. It’s very difficult to run the same stuff throughout the year, so there were different parts of our season that provoked kind of different stuff. We never really got a lot of continuity or got to deeper layers of our offensive understanding. So that’s been positive to wipe the slate clean and do some new things, new concepts.”
From training camp through Thursday night’s second preseason tilt against Miami, it’s readily apparent that many of their new concepts are based in motion rather than isolation, and intended to produce open 3-point looks.
Now, the Nets have always relied on the 3-pointer in general manager Sean Marks’ analytics-driven era. But these won’t be step-back 3s off Harden clear-outs, but playing inside-out. Without a dominant post threat, it’ll either be Simmons creating out of the dunker spot, or drive-and-kick with an array of screens designed to get clean corner 3s.
“We want to limit those games that [see the ball stick], where we can just settle in and the ball is hopping, everyone’s touching it,” Irving said. “There’s nothing like watching a basketball game when everybody’s moving with pace and everyone’s touching the ball. In comparison to last year … there was just a lot of random isolation.”
Motion offense is more similar to what Marks was used to in his San Antonio days — and how Patty Mills played in a Spurs uniform.
“That was my background, so definitely felt the stagnant type of offense last year. … It was a challenge,” Mills said.
“But what we’ve put in this year is definitely different, and learning from those times as well. How can we get easy buckets for Kevin? How can we get easy looks for Ky? And Ben makes a massive difference too, bringing the ball up the court. All of these subtle changes make a big difference in the energy of the group.”