Nets Are Scorching

The Nets used a strong third quarter to turn what was looking to be a blowout into a close game, but inevitably fell 102-93 to the Portland Trailblazers at the Izod Center tonight.

• Devin Harris had a strong game in the losing effort, scoring 28 points, including 10-11 on free throws, and dishing 5 assists. He even had a blocked shot.
• Courtney Lee also scored 28 points, finishing 4-4 from three-point land, including a 55-foot trey at the end of the game.
• Brandon Roy scored 28 and LaMarcus Aldridge 27 for the Blazers, who shot 54.1 percent for the game and only turned the ball over 4 times.
• Another double-double for Brook Lopez, who finished with 17 points and 10 rebounds.

Before I get to the game preview tonight, I just wanted to talk about something real quick.  Things are starting to get chippy again in the comments again.  I know that this is a tough season and it is wearing everyone’s patience pretty thin, but you guys still need to be respectful to each other.  Just do me a favor and check out the commenting constitution one more time.  Thanks.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about tonight’s game.  Portland is coming off a tough loss Sunday night against the Jazz where they held a pretty big fourth quarter lead and gave it away, allowing the Utah Jazz to send the game into overtime, where the Jazz won.  There is no question in my mind that Portland is going to come out like gangbusters tonight.  If New Jersey can whether the first burst, I think they can hang with them for the duration of the game.  If they get down double-digits early, this isn’t going to go well.  Onto the lineups…

Devin Harris vs. Andre Miller

With Steve Blake now in L.A. playing for the Clippers, Andre Miller and Jared Bayless have been getting the majority of time at the point.  Miller isn’t going to blow by anyone at this point in his career, and he struggles with the outside jumper, but the one thing Miller does well is playing with his back to the basket.  I see Miller posting (or at least trying to) Devin up a lot tonight.  On the other end, Devin needs to use his quickness to get into the lane and make plays.

Advantage:  Devin Harris

Courtney Lee vs. Brandon Roy

Brandon Roy is Portland’s go to guy.  Late in the game, if the ball is in his hands, Portland is usually in a good spot.  So the goal of the Nets’ defense tonight is to keep the ball out of Roy’s hands.  I think that this can be done.  Courtney Lee is a very hard worker and a real good defender, so if the Nets decide to deny Roy, they could have a chance at shutting him down.

Advantage:  Brandon Roy

Trenton Hassell vs. Martell Webster

It’s funny, the day Mark decides to talk about CDR and why everyone continues to discuss him, Hayes is going to be out and CDR is being talked about everyone again.  According to Dave D, Trenton Hassell is starting, but CDR is going to be in the rotation:

Vandeweghe said Trenton Hassel will start at small forward in Hayes’ absence. Chris Douglas-Roberts, who did not get off the bench in Sunday’s game, will not start but be in the playing rotation tonight, Vandeweghe said. The coach said CDR’s DNP Sunday was the result of “an internal matter,” though CDR had a puzzled look on his face when asked about this “internal matter.”

Advantage:  Martell Webster

Yi vs. LaMarcus Aldridge

Aldridge is a very talented and athletic big, and the exact type of player that gives Yi a ton a trouble.  Aldridge doesn’t really work out of the post, but that doesn’t really effect his productivity.  On the other hand, Yi had a decent game last night, but I expect him to struggle tonight.

Advantage:  LaMarcus Aldridge

Brook Lopez vs. Marcus Camby

Brook Lopez had a tremendous game last time out, but it was actually a bit of a disappointment if you watched the game.  Brook had 22 points in the first half, and only finished with 26.  There has been a lot of talk about who is at fault for the lack of touches Brook gets.  I have heard Brook needs to demand the ball more, Devin needs to force it into him, and Kiki needs to call more plays for him.  Those are all valid arguments, but in my opinion it is the lack of shooting on this team that really hurts him.  Late in games, you see teams playing zone against the Nets or doubling Brook right on the catch, because nobody else on the court scares opposing teams.  Look at the games where the Nets shot well from the outside, and I guarantee you will see Brook have good numbers in that game.

Advantage:  Push

The Portland Trailblazers may have one of the savviest online fan-bases in the NBA. And a lot of that is due to the greatness of the Blazers blog, Blazers Edge. Benjamin Golliver on BE was nice enough to enter today’s Bloggers Talk hotseat to talk Nets/Blazers tonight. Be sure to follow him tonight, and any time you want Blazers updates and thoughts, over at his Twitter account.

NAS: The storyline coming out of Portland right now seems to be their stunning collapse Sunday night against the Utah Jazz. From an outsider’s perspective, the Blazers look like a team that knows how to deal with adversity. From your perspective, do you see the team recovering from this setback, or could this be the game that sets the season into a downward spiral?

This team has proven to be fairly resilient and it’s finally starting to get healthy, so I’m not sure there’s a huge concern that things are going to spiral, at least in the short-term.  If anything, I think the team is looking at this upcoming road trip — which starts in New Jersey — as an opportunity to stack some much-needed Ws, as 3 of the 5 games are against non-playoff teams.  If the Blazers don’t exit the trip with a winning record, or if Brandon Roy suffers another health setback, I think the urgency level will ratchet up immediately.  People will flip out, no question.

On the bright side, the team’s March schedule slows down some (13 days in 31 nights) and the quality of competition drops (just 5 current playoff teams) so there’s still some upside potential for this group although that feels difficult to type coming off back-to-back brutal losses to the Celtics and the Jazz.  With a healthy Brandon Roy (but no Greg Oden), this team is probably the 6th best in the Western Conference. Without a productive Roy it could drop as far as 11th.  So anywhere in between those two poles is still in play.

NAS: How has Marcus Camby looked early on?

I was joking the other day that the Blazers gave up playing with a healthy center for both Ramadan and Lent this year.  Now that Camby is here it’s time to gorge.

It’s been the fairly typical mixed bag play you would expect from a mid-season acquisition.  He’s looked lost at times on both ends of the floor and committed some turnovers by sending up-tempo outlet passes to places where the slow-down Portland guards were not expecting them. But he’s made an immediate impact on the boards (he had 18 on Sunday night) and brings highlight-reel quality swatting that the Blazers haven’t had at the 5 spot since both Oden and Joel Przybilla went down with injury.  Nate McMillan has admitted that he’s still limiting his offensive playbook when Camby is in the game but the hope is he will have all the information picked up sooner rather than later.  He seems to be a quick study and has been very receptive to coaching, his teammates and fans here in Portland already during his first week in town.

The big question on offense for Camby is whether he will be able to lay off his inefficient midrange shot.  If he can do that, he should fit well as he’s mobile on the perimeter and has shown the ability to set some good screens.  On defense, he’s such a big upgrade over Juwan Howard that it’s not even worth nitpicking.

NAS: How concerned are you over the long haul with Brandon Roy’s hamstring injury?

Long-term, not that concerned at all.  With a summer of rest, rehab and recovery I think everyone expects Roy to enter camp next year 100%.

If you meant long haul as in the rest of this season I think that’s one of the top two questions facing this Blazers team, the other being the inconsistent play of its role players (Rudy Fernandez, Martell Webster, Jerryd Bayless, Nicolas Batum).

Roy has repeatedly reported worrisome symptoms after recent games — pain, soreness, tightness, discomfort — and perhaps most disconcerting has been his regular statements about a fear of or concern about suffering a re-injury.  In a January game against Philadelphia he re-aggravated the hamstring on a drive to the basket, which caused him to miss the All Star Game and led to the last month of downtime. His play recently has been tentative and non-explosive, as if he’s concerned about making demonstrative moves with the ball in his hands because they might lead to another pull.

He did seem to show an ability to adapt to playing with the injury on Sunday against Utah, as he scored 23 points.  He’s really smart at finding ways to score that require limited effort or impact on his hamstring (face up jumpers, free throws).  But he’s been a shell of his former self right now on both sides of the ball. That’s obviously a concern as he’s the team’s franchise player and their go-to option in just about every 4th quarter.  Should Roy not be able to play out the season or only be able to play in a limited capacity, more of the offensive load falls to Andre Miller and Martell Webster, who have stepped up admirably at times this season but simply are not reliable scoring threats like Roy is.  If he’s not able to impact games meaningfully, this is a borderline playoff team at best.

For a second round draft pick who’s not known as a shooter or for his defense, there’s just something oddly fascinating about the downward spiral of Chris Douglas-Robert’s 2009-10 NBA season.

He certainly showed flashes of being a rotation player late last season and earlier this season. While the roster was decimated by injury in November, CDR appeared to be riding shotgun with Brook Lopez as the only consistent offensive performers on the team, averaging 17.3 points points per game. But in the following months, CDR’s role on offense diminished greatly. Last month, he was replaced in the starting lineup by Jarvis Hayes, and rumors of him “falling out of favor” with coach Kiki Vandeweghe seemed to have put a further crimp on his playing time. On Sunday, he earned the dreaded, DNP-CD against the Memphis Grizzlies, and an unnamed team executive said Douglas-Roberts was late for a practice, as the reasoning. CDR disputed that claim on his Twitter page, a tool he often uses, rumor has it, much to the chagrin of Kiki and other members on the Nets front office.

Both Sebastian and I have spent a lot of time breaking down and analyzing CDR’s season from both a basketball-sense – which is obviously more objective – and from a more philosophical, subjective perspective. And it seems like many of the team’s beat writers take this approach with CDR as well. Because what’s not to like about a guy who always seems willing to talk candidly when a microphone or a notebook is shoved in front of his face. CDR has told the world in one way or another, that his team is soft, has no heart and has developed a new “system” of which he plays less of a role. He’s Tweeted about loving his “Memphis People” after trade rumors regarding sending him to the Grizzlies surfaced, and then emphatically denied he was pining for a trade after the fact.

And all of these factors have created a gravitational pull around CDR whether you love him or hate him. Has anyone questioned why Trenton Hassell hasn’t received playing time from Kiki Vandeweghe recently, despite playing above expectations earlier this season? How about Bobby Simmons who was one of the better shooting SFs in all of the NBA last season? Simmons hasn’t played in months.

CDR hasn’t been a factor in a Nets game in more than a month.  He plays a position where the Nets actually have some decent depth on the roster, and stand to acquire more depth giving the high profile names on this summer’s free agent list. Maybe it’s time for us all to collectively stop wringing our hands and obsessing over what CDR is doing, the good and the bad. If he’s truly falling out of favor with the organization, that will be demonstrated in due time when he is either traded this summer or released.  It just seems like a lot of ink has been spent rehashing something that seems to only be affecting one player who may or may not even be in the league a year from now.

And we’re back….

The story of the day out of Nets practice yesterday was Brook Lopez and his lack of touches in the second half of Sunday’s loss to the Memphis Grizzlies. In the Star-Ledger, Kiki Vandeweghe explains: “Defenses aren’t stupid,’’ coach/GM Kiki Vandeweghe said when asked why Lopez seems to have so many hot starts/cold finishes. “They’re going to load everyone around him and when he catches they’re running guys at him.

Lopez, sounding a little more frustrated than usual, told Al Iannazzone: “I just think when a player’s playing well, when a player’s hot, we need to get that guy the ball,” Lopez said after practice Monday. “But we just need to play team basketball.”

Fred Keber says: Brook Lopez may have to go a little Norman Bates if the Nets are going to avoid the infamy of the worst record in NBA history.

Advanced Box Score | 3 Shades Of Blue | Straight Outta Vancouver

I am fairly confident in saying that the Nets’ first half last night against the Grizzlies was the best half of basketball that they have played all year.  I mean their attack was perfect.  They were running very opportunistically, pushing the ball, but if there wasn’t anything there, they would slow things down and hit Brook Lopez in the post.  I have been saying all year this is the Nets best chance to win, and they proved that when they play like that they can hang in (and take a double digit lead) with some of the best teams in the NBA.  The problem is, for whatever reason they just stop doing what works, and I don’t really know why.  Is it because that they tense up when a game is within reach because of what happened this season?  Could be.  Is it because they just aren’t good enough offensively to maintain a consistent offensive attack?  Possibly.  Every time a team makes a run on the Nets it’s almost like they just throw their hands up and say, “you know what?  That’s it, we lost.”  The thing that really bothers me is that the Nets have one of the best slump-breakers on their team, Brook Lopez.

I call Brook a slump-breaker because whenever a team can’t hit a shot from the outside (or get an open look), they tend to just toss it inside, and let their big man work.  Brook was on some kind of roll in the first half of last night’s game.  He was hitting open jumpers, working well off the ball (getting a good amount of lobs), and when he got the ball in the post, he just flat-out abused his defender (the one play where he spinned inside and hit a nice little step back jumper being his nicest move).  However, Brook picked up 2 offensive fouls late in the first half (after already having one), giving him 3 and it really killed his momentum.  As he walked off the court with a little over 2 minutes in the first half, Brook had 22 points.  He finished with just 26.  Brook was getting such a consistent amount of touches inside in the first half, it is just really hard to comprehend how he only took 3 shots in the second half (he was 9-11 in the first half, and finished going 11-14).  This schizophrenic play by the Nets is what may keep them from getting 5 more wins to avoid the worst record in the NBA.  Some more thoughts after the jump.

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Guys, as you may have known, the site was down for a little over 24 hours starting Sunday morning.  The issue was server where our domain was being hosted at got attacked.  We are back up and running now, but I just wanted to apologize for the inconvenience that this may have caused.  I will have a Thoughts on the Game up for last night’s game soon, and starting tomorrow, we will be back on our regular schedule of content.  Sorry again.

NBAE Getty Image

Hoopdata Box Score – Raptors Republic – View from the Couch

At 5 wins and 50 losses, it’s easy to say the New Jersey Nets don’t match up well with most teams in the NBA. But there’s something about the way the Toronto Raptors play basketball that really exposes the most damning flaws for the Nets, as was seen in last night’s 106-89 loss at the Izod Center.

Even without Chris Bosh, who missed last night’s game with an injury, the Raptors were totally content to make the Nets stop them from the perimeter, mixing in some back door cuts to get some points at the rim. The Nets are notorious for poor perimeter defense because they just don’t seem capable of ever rotating to the ball effectively. Meanwhile, because of the collective low basketball IQ of the Nets’ frontcourt, they are often befuddled by teams that run a lot of backdoor screens. Guys like Yi Jianlian, Kris Humphries, and yes, even Brook Lopez lose track of either the players their guarding, or where the ball is going, leading to all too easy buckets at the rim.

Two plays that stand out for me that truly bring home the Nets interior and perimeter defensive deficiencies both came in the third quarter – interestingly enough the only period where the Nets outscored the Raptors, making this game look somewhat closer at points than it actually was.

At the 3:05 mark DeMar DeRozan made a back door cut and was able to blow by Devin Harris on the right to get a wide open path to the basket along the strong side baseline. Josh Boone, Yi Jianlian, Terrence Williams and Keyon Dooling, the other four Nets players on the court at the time, all had their backs to DeRozan and seemed completely unaware that the play was either developing. It was such a shocking development for me that I rewatched the play a few more times and saw the same thing – outside of Devin Harris, who was able to foul DeRozan to prevent the dunk, I don’t think a single Net knew where the ball was – and if they did know where it was, they seemed completely disinterested in trying to be a help defender and either attempt to block the shot, draw a charge, or take DeRozan down to prevent the easy bucket. Four NBA players should not look so clueless on a play.

As for perimeter defense, at the end of the third quarter the Nets got punished for going with a small lineup of Boone-TWill-Dooling-Hayes and Devin Harris while the Raptors still had Andrea Bargnani and Amir Johnson – two big men, on the floor. On two occasions earlier in the quarter, Bargnani found his way into the post matched up with Terrence Williams and was able to score at ease. In the final seconds of the third, Bargnani found his way into the post against Williams again, and this time Hayes, who was guarding Calderon at the top of the key, left his man to double. Calderon naturally got the ball and Jarvis was in too deep to get back to him, leaving Josh Boone to desperately jump at him. Calderon calmly pump faked to get Boone out of the picture, and drilled the three.

Here’s some overall evidence of poor perimeter defense from the Nets. For the entire game, the Raptors shot 13-21 on their long twos (16-23 feet) good for 62 percent. Rasho Nesterovic was 6-6 on long twos just by himself. I guess there’s an element of luck to hit such a high percentage of lower percentage shots, but again, you don’t have to be a professional scout to know the Raptors like to shoot and shoot often. How the Nets were so ill prepared for this facet of Toronto’s game is shocking.

More thoughts after the jump.
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