Do the Nets Need a Heart Transplant?
by Mark Ginocchio
Nov 2, 2009 Brook Lopez, Chris Douglas-Roberts, Courtney Lee, Eduardo Najera, Lawrence Frank, Yi
It’s only been three games – including one game where the team blew a 16-point lead in the fourth quarter, and another game where they game up 123-points to a team that was missing two of their top scorers – but there’s already some buzz in the Nets locker room about “trust,” “toughness,” and “heart.”
The catalyst for all this were comments by Chris Douglas-Roberts Saturday night, who believed the team didn’t retaliate properly after he was slammed to the floor in the second quarter on a dunk attempt. “You have to protect each other,” CDR said. “It’s an unwritten rule. You protect each other. Later that night on Twitter, he wrote similar comments about the team needing to commit hard fouls.
In a report by Al Iannazzone in the Bergen Record this morning, more Nets echo these sentiments. Here are some of their quotes:
“I think people are afraid,” center Brook Lopez said of the defense. “It’s a team effort. [But] some guys are afraid that the help won’t be there.”
And here’s some more from Courtney Lee:
“That definitely has to do with trust,” defensive-minded guard Courtney Lee said. “You have to have trust in your teammates that they’ll have your back. If you’re out there pressuring the ball and the pick-and-roll comes and you’re a little late, you have to have trust that the help man is going to get the roll man so the big man can stay out a little longer.
When I first read the CDR quotes Saturday night, I was a bit annoyed and was ready to dedicate a post about him calling out his teammates, but I thought better of it. While there isn’t a lot to praise about the Nets defensive performance Saturday night, I do feel they made some attempts to get the Wizards back for the CDR foul. Specifically at the 5:01 mark in the third quarter, Gilbert Arenas had a free path to the rim, and Eduardo Najera came up on from behind and grabbed him by the shoulders to prevent the layup. Arenas didn’t crash to the floor in a heap, but the message was sent, so much so that Brendan Haywood starred to jaw with Najera after the play, who just smiled back and shook his head.
With that said, based on Iannazzone’s report, it’s certainly alarming that the team is already at the point of publicly questioning each other, specifically on the defensive end. Maybe they’re going to use theses words as a rallying cry headed into tonight’s matchup against the Charlotte Bobcats. But I’m not as sure about that.
In watching the first three games, I’ve seen a Nets team that can’t shoot with any consistency and one that exhibits poor fundamentals on the defensive end. On the offensive end, those open shots currently being missed by guys like Courtney Lee and Devin Harris (when he was healthy), are either going to the fall, or they won’t. There’s not much to coach there. But on the defensive end, I see a team that keeps making the same mistakes. Lawrence Frank called the performance “putrid” Saturday night – so what is he doing to fix it?
For example, the perimeter defense is still an atrocity. Why does this keep happening? Look at the 8:04 mark of the third quarter Saturday night. It’s an example of a defensive miscue that keeps happening night after night after night with this team going back to last season. The Wizards have the ball in the post, and the Nets just start collapsing, giving Brook, or whichever big man they have on the floor, one or two help defenders. Meanwhile, Gilbert Arenas, one of the league’s best shooters, is lurking in the corner behind the three-point line. By the time the ball is kicked out of the post to Arenas, Rafer Alston has sunk so far deep into the post on help, he can’t even get back to the corner fast enough to get a hand in Arenas’ face. These are defensive rotations that I hope the coaching staff is working on every single day in practice. And if they are, they need to spend even more time on them, because this group of players just isn’t getting it.
A lot was made about Andray Blatche’s 30 points on 15-18 shooting Saturday night. While he hit a ton of open jumpers, the guy also abused Yi in the post throughout the evening, getting Yi in the air on numerous occasions before setting for his shot. Now, I realize that teaching Yi footwork and one-on-one defense is headed in the direction of “lost cause,” but is Yi committing so early because he lacks heart or trust, or because he’s just a poor defender to begin with?
So, while it’s easy to start questioning the heart and toughness of the Nets, what I’ve witnessed is the obvious – this team just isn’t very good right now. They’re making the same mistakes on defense and they are not shooting well enough to make up for it. The root cause of that is the coaching and talent-level of your roster, not some imaginary intangible exhibited by guys like David Eckstein and Chris Andersen. If the Nets want to sit in the locker room after getting their rear ends handed to them and start questioning each other’s heart to motivate themselves, that’s fine, but I believe the frustration is being misdirected. They need to start concentrating on how to stop history from repeating itself, and if they’re physically unable to do that because of their lack of talent, they need to get used to getting blown out of the water by teams that hit their open shots with the frequency of the Wizards.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:19 PM
I think it all comes back to Harris’s injury. He’s the guy who makes the team go on both ends of the floor, and without him they don’t have an alpha dog. Alston may want to play the role, but he’s still a “go my own way” guy at heart and isn’t a fraction of the defender Harris is.
So yeah, at this point the story is “Team’s best player injured; Play suffers as a result.” Predictable stuff, and frustrating because it has such an impact mentally as well as physically. But that’s the way things go with young teams in the league.
The good news is there’s real potential for the Nets to be this year’s version of the pre-Big Al injury T-Wolves of last year. If Harris comes back healthy, if Lopez keeps developing, if Lee starts hitting his 3s…
And if all of that doesn’t happen, you still end up with a lottery pick and $25 million of cap room. Grey clouds, silver linings and all that.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:30 PM
Very true Matt – I think it was very clear from the first two games that Devin wasn’t good to go out there. He looked sluggish on defense and lacked his usual explosiveness on offense – all signs of an injury that would affect his mobility.
Still, even with a healthy Devin, there are just some coachable things the Nets still don’t do on defense. Are the players uncoachable or are the coaches not coaching? That’s the big issue for me.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:54 PM
Alston is uncoachable, IMHO. He always takes risks – always has, always will, and the only way to hide it is if you have, say, Dwight Howard guarding the rim. Lopez is good, and edging toward great, but he’s not Howard.
As for the young guys… they’re young. I’m not the biggest LFrank fan in the world, but you’ve gotta expect some amount of stupid mistakes from guys who are just now becoming NBA regulars.
So I say patience. If this is still a problem come January,* then it may be time to consider a shake-up.
*And the thing is, you can wait til January and still have a shot at making the playoffs because the bottom 2/3s of the conference is awful.
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:58 PM
I just have to LOL at Alston not being “a fraction of the defender of Harris”. Devin Harris was a very good defender in Dallas. He has been a turnstyle in New Jersey. The reality is Harris was a fraction of the defender Alston was last year. If you watched the Nets and Magic last year it was plain to see. I’ll give Harris a pass so far this year, because a groin injury will hamper your defense, but it looks like more of the same so far this year.
Hopefully Harris can learn to defend again at some point… but it doesn’t help that people like Matt are still giving Harris props defensively when he hasn’t defended well since his Dallas days. He doesn’t have to be elite, as he has way more scoring responsibilities on this team…. I just don’t want to see him to get back to the level of atleast decent defender.
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:00 PM
correction on last line: “I just want to see” not “I just don’t want to see”
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:51 PM
I knew somone was going to pick at that comment. True Harris didn’t defend well last year. I kind see that as a predictable thing since he had to be a hustle player to get his playing time in dallas because the team had so much talent. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think Devin started untill the western confrence against SA when he destroyed TP with his D. So unless I’m wrong (again I don’t remember if it was that specifc series I know he didn’t start before the playoffs) it was Harris’ D that got him his starting job. So yeah in dallas he did what he could to play. I feel like he’s not going to be as avoided when he’s gone from fighting to his time to the go to scorer that offense is being rebuilt for. I think he embraced his new role as the offensive force and somewhere in there the focus on D is gone. Probably also due to the excitment of having a break out season and seeing what he could do on offense. The good news is we know that he is capble of being a good defender and not in the he has the potential to be or he was a great defender in college but we’ll have to see how he pans out in the pros king of way like T Will (not a gid I’m really liking the guy and I think he’ll be a great defender) we have actually seen Harris play great defense against the elite offensive point guards in the game. We know he can do it its just a question of desire and if he can do it while giving us the scoring we need. If Devin was to play to how he played D in big D (pun much) before esp beacause how old he is Rafer wouldn’t be a fraction of the defender Devin is. But that not the case right now. So yeah the good news is we know Devin can play D and he’s been talking about it a lot over the last few months so we’ll just have wait and see how ti goes now that he’s not all caught up in his breakout season like last year. Sorry was a lot longer than I intended.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:49 AM
[...] losing has led to some really eye-opening post-game quotes this season. Remember, it was CDR who challenged his teammates after a humiliating blowout loss to Washington to foul harder and to “protect each [...]