Brooklyn Nets: Can’t Afford Another Slow Start
By Adam McGee
If the Brooklyn Nets have a masterplan for how they want the 2014-15 season to unfold, my guess is it doesn’t start with a heavy opening night defeat to the Boston Celtics. Although on paper the Nets seemed to have the much more talented and deeper roster, it made zero difference in reality as the Celtics coasted to a 121-105 victory Wednesday night.
Breaking down the game, there were multiple takeaways for the Brooklyn Nets, and not many of them were positive. First and foremost, from a defensive point of view, giving up over 120 points is not good, but it’s the distribution of those points that really shows how the Nets were picked apart. The Celtics had eight different players score 10 or more points, as the Nets were unable to stop such a balanced team approach.
The one big positive for Brooklyn is that this is only the first game of the season, though. If you’re going to have an off-night, it’s best to get it out of the way in October when you’ve got all of the time in the world to fix things. What is important, though, is that the Nets come out strong in their next few games, and try to get into a winning stride, instead of letting bad patterns develop.
After a season that finished with them as the sixth seed, and progressing to the second round of the playoffs, it’s easy to forget just how much work it took Brooklyn to achieve those feats last year. Many have forgotten just how terrible the Nets were in the early part of last season, as Jason Kidd tried to get a grip on the head coaching role, and new players like Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce tried to get acclimated to life with a new team.
Some might dismiss the Nets’ different runs of form as just being a part of the ebb and flow that makes up an 82-game season, but that’s not really true. The Nets’ start was much worse than that. At the end of December last year, the Nets sat on a dismal record of 10-21, with the playoffs seeming far into the distance. The fact that Brooklyn turned that around, going 34-17 for the 2014 part of the season stands as testament to them, but also begs the question of what could have been.
If the Nets had played to even just one game below .500 for those first three months last season, they would have entered the playoffs as the third seed in the East. Sure, that may not have had much of an impact on the way things eventually played out, as it still would have put them on track to meet Miami in the second round, but entering the playoffs as a third seed who earned home court would have been a welcome psychological edge.
Although we can’t be certain for a couple of months until we see exactly how different teams shape up, there seems to be a general consensus that the East has got better, and grown more competitive this season. For the Nets, that just means that they can’t afford to dig themselves into any holes by starting slowly, and the easiest way to combat that will be to start by bouncing back with a win against Detroit tomorrow night.