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The Nets have backed themselves into a corner, with no choice but to fight their way out.
And Kyrie Irving’s choice of metaphors showed that, urging his teammates to come out swinging for Tuesday’s tilt against the visiting Rockets.
“Go home, and — this is just a metaphor — you go home, you get your bulletproof vest, you get your handgun, you get your rocket launcher, you get your AK, you get everything. You load up all the ammo,” Irving said. “It’s just a metaphor, people. But you go home and get ready for war.
“And you don’t just live with the results, but you go out there with a mental focus and a no-fear attitude and we really play for each other. That’s what it comes down to. We don’t have any time to waste. … For us, it’s not ideal, the season we’ve had. So now, down the stretch, we’ve got to figure it out. … But now, it’s just finishing the basketball games in regulation the way we feel we need to and not being careless.”
Brooklyn’s carelessness is what got it into this situation, both the micro of Saturday’s damaging loss in Atlanta and the macro of a bitterly disappointing campaign. Laissez-faire all too often, they’ve appeared to take a deep playoff run for granted, but now find themselves in the play-in with no wiggle room left.
The Nets are 10th in the East, needing two play-in victories to advance into the playoffs and face the daunting prospect of single-elimination. Forget March Madness, this is April Insanity.
And they’ll have nobody to blame but themselves. Injuries have dealt them a bad hand, but they’ve played it poorly.
“Our guys are disappointed. They know we can play better,” coach Steve Nash said. “We can’t make excuses. We’ve been hurt all the time. You’ve got to be ready to play, you’ve got to find a way. If you’re out of the rotation, you get in the rotation. And that goes for the guys that are already in the rotation, just raising our level. Fine margins.”
The Nets are the league’s worst defensive rebounding team. But compounding that with undisciplined defense and silly reach-in fouls — they handed the Hawks a 49-19 edge in free throws taken Saturday — cost them.
“It’s just undisciplined. And we do that a lot,” said Kevin Durant, who saw his career-high 55 points squandered on Saturday. “That’s just bad basketball.”
But the fact their remaining foes have largely played even worse basketball could still see Brooklyn climb up to eighth, and double-elimination territory needing just one play-in win to advance.
With four regular-season games left against foes with an aggregate .391 winning percentage — the Rockets, Knicks, Cavaliers and Pacers, never leaving the city limits — they have the softest remaining slate in the league according to Tankathon. Eighth-seeded Atlanta, whom they trail by a game, has the 19th-hardest. Ninth-seeded Charlotte — even with the Nets holding the tiebreaker — is 20th-toughest.
“We have to find that consistency, and I know we will. Time is not on our side, again, but I feel confident in our group that we’re able to do what we need to do,” Irving said. “I know we’ll be better moving forward. We have to be.”
They should be against a Houston team with all sorts of problems, just 20-58 entering Sunday’s game against Minnesota.
“We’ve had a lot of adversity this year,” Nash said. “We have to regroup, take [Sunday] off and come back ready to keep rebuilding. We’ve got four big games left and we’ve been playing good basketball lately. We’re unlucky not to win a few more of these on this stretch. … Clear our minds, recover, and get back at it.”
The clock is almost run out for the Nets to get it together.
“I can’t come here and act like [I’m] losing confidence,” Durant said. “We lost some games. We’re going to keep playing until it’s over.”
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