That the Brooklyn Nets are even in the playoffs says a lot about the sad state of the East. This is an aimless franchise that floated irrelevantly through most of the season and held a fire sale at the trade deadline that nobody attended. They're only here because they got it together in the final month of the season and received help from the Indiana Pacers to get the No. 8 seed. Barring a major surprise, they will be quickly dispatched by the Hawks in the first round and have little hope for significant improvement in the future.
Brooklyn Nets playoff preview: An uninspiring season will probably end soon
The Brooklyn Nets are the least interesting team in the playoffs, but at least they won’t give up a lottery pick.
Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports
But at least they're here, which is a lot more than you can say about some East teams that fell apart. Spurred by Brook Lopez's emergence, Deron Williams' return to competency and newcomer Thaddeus Young, the Nets finished 13-6 in their last 19 games. Many of those wins were against bad teams or ones resting players, but they also boast victories over a full-strength Cavaliers club and the West-leading Warriors this year. For whatever reason, they've found a formula that works for their roster.
The Nets don’t defend well enough to beat the Hawks, but at least Lopez, Williams and a nicely spaced offense could maybe win them a game or two. Considering the alternative was taking on horrible contracts for their depreciated assets and handing their first-round opponents a lottery pick, they’ve at least made the best of a bad situation.
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How they beat you
The Nets have a top-10 offense since March 1 and it's not hard to see why. They have arguably the league's most complete offensive center in Lopez, at least when he's this healthy. They have a quality point guard in Williams and a skilled, if sometimes erratic, backup in Jarrett Jack. They have a power forward in Young that stretches defenses even though he's not a great perimeter shooter. They have wing marksmen and secondary ball-handlers in Joe Johnson and rookie Bojan Bogdanovic.
With all these elements, the Nets’ pick-and-roll game is tough to stop. Lopez is a mountain on both full and short rolls, with soft hands and touch around the basket. He’s the best in the league at catching a bounce pass at the free throw line, stopping and flipping a 12-footer into the hoop. This move is unstoppable.
If you help too much on Lopez, Johnson, Bogdanovic and occasionally Alan Anderson can hit shots from the perimeter, while Young cuts into open spaces or sneaks in on the offensive glass.
Young is the key element to Brooklyn’s offensive rise. After shooting more threes in Philly’s grand experiment and failing in Minnesota while being pigeonholed in a traditional power forward role, Young’s again the floor-spacing garbage man he was in his heyday. He has a knack for stepping into the right gap at the right time around the basket for scores. It’s to the point where his cutting is its own form of spacing.
Hollins’ offense isn’t especially complicated, but it doesn’t need to be with these elements.
How you beat them
By playing offense. The Nets have been a poor defensive team all season and have, in fact, given up more points per 100 possessions (105.7) during their 19-game surge than they had the rest of the year. They are so bereft of wing athleticism that second-round rookie Markel Brown starts and plays big minutes. Williams and Jack are sieves, Bogdanovic is slow laterally, Lopez still doesn't rebound well and Young is undersized. Hollins is known as a defensive-minded coach, but he doesn't exactly have the raw tools to assemble a cohesive unit.
Yet the Nets are also remarkably slow to make in-game adjustments to their pick-and-roll coverages. The 19-point home loss to the Celtics that decided the tiebreaker between the two teams was particularly instructive. The Celtics ran the same exact pick-and-roll play on four straight possessions -- it's called "Stack" because a guard and big man stack up in an "I" formation of sorts before darting in different directions -- and got easy buckets each time to turn a close game into a blowout.
Getting beat on the same play twice in a row is one thing. Four times in a row is another. Similar breakdowns on repeated plays have cost Brooklyn close games all season.
Most important player
It took several months, but Lopez and Lionel Hollins finally seem to understand each other. They haven't exactly been like peas in a pod this year, with Hollins calling out Lopez for being soft, lazy and uninterested in doing anything but score. Lopez, if you'll recall, was nearly dealt to the Thunder at the trade deadline because of all of this.
But at some point -- a meeting on Feb. 6, if you believe the Nets coach -- Hollins realized he couldn't reach Lopez with tough love like he could with his Grizzlies players. Maybe Brook isn't the best rebounder or defender, but he can put the ball in the basket in ways few centers can. That's why Hollins redesigned the offense, placing Lopez in more pick-and-roll situations and taking the ball out of Johnson's hands.
The Nets’ offensive efficiency since the change speaks for itself. The Nets were averaging fewer than 101 points per 100 possessions before March 1. They’ve averaged nearly 107 since.
Double Whammy
You might be confused by the sight of a crazy old man trying to heckle free-throw shooters during Nets home games. In real life, his name is Bruce Reznick and he’s a successful attorney. But when he’s at Barclays Center, he goes by the pseudonym “Mr. Whammy” and he morphs into this.
Mr. Whammy has been around the Nets 16 years, so most know who he is. But a landmark moment happened in a late March game when LeBron James asked for him to be moved from his seat. The Nets reluctantly complied, but Mr. Whammy got the last laugh when Brooklyn won the game. Finally, the Nets' superfan actually got in a player's head.
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