[ad_1]
For the Nets, quite a lot will come down to this.
Thursday is Game 81 of the season for the 42-38 outfit, and likely the most important they’ll play. If they can beat the Cavaliers, who are directly ahead of them in the standings, the Nets will jump into the 7-seed on a tiebreak, with the superior head-to-head record over Cleveland. That means the play-in game — barring results in Game 82 — will be at home in Brooklyn, with the Nets getting another bite at the apple if they lose.
Lose to Cleveland, though, and the 7-seed is out of reach. It’s also within the realm of possibility that Brooklyn would fall back into the 9-10 game — the Nets are currently tied with Atlanta on record — giving them no margin for error in the tournament.
It’s easy to assume that once the playoffs start, the Nets could turn into the force they’ve failed to be all season, with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant both available, even if Ben Simmons might not be. But for that to happen, they do have to, you know, get there.
“We’ve faced so many things this year that I think emotionally and physically have worn the team out,” coach Steve Nash told reporters following Wednesday’s win over the Knicks. “And then now we need our best effort, and I think sometimes that is a difficult mix of emotions and physical and mental exhaustion that we have to weather here for a little bit. Nights like tonight can help us freshen up and feel that belief again.”
Nights like Wednesday, when the Nets went down 17 in the first half before outsourcing the Knicks by 29 in the second half to win 110-98, help remind you of what they can be and why they’ve failed to consistently get there.
“I hate being down,” Kevin Durant said. “I hate even being that team. Get down and fight back. Like, I don’t even like that s–t. I don’t want that to be a part of who we are.”
He was talking about the game. He might as well have been talking about the season.
The Nets, by any objective measure of their talent, should not be in this position going into the second-to-last game of the season. They should not be worried about their first-half effort either. But it is hard to argue with Patty Mills’ assessment.
“I think the satisfying part is knowing that we have this fight in us and we have what we have in the locker room, and we all believe and understand that we have what we need to get the job done on any given night,” Mills said. “As well as knowing we can be the last team standing.
Getty Images
“The other side of the fence is knowing that we gotta have a consistent 48 minutes of a game to be that team. And we know it’s in us.”
Much of that will come back to Irving and Durant. On Wednesday night, Irving talked about the “small conversations” the two had throughout the game, and how it helped the Nets climb out of their deficit. They know the rest of the team looks to them. They know the Nets will go where they take them.
“I really lean in on him and he knows I’m just a killer alongside him,” Irving said. “So he can be hard on me. And he can say almost anything he wants in the heat of the moment. But we just know we could demand excellence out of one another, and we just want to have that energy carry on to the rest of the group.”
For so much of the season, that excellence hasn’t been there.
Home court in the play-in doesn’t function as adequate consolation for that. But it could be the first step in finding it.
[ad_2]