Throughout the season, the Nets have sought improvement, growth and progress, all the stuff teams seek when they know the playoffs aren’t happening. To achieve those elements, any team needs one trait above all: consistency. And for the Nets, attaining consistency has been as easy as lassoing a fly.
It goes beyond home-road. The Nets have been fairly solid of late at home (12-12) and have been terrible all year on the road (3-24). Check the last 10 days, which included a game with no defense at Indiana; a game with no offense at Milwaukee; the best game of the year in a home stomp of Denver, a no-transition defense game against Philadelphia; a toughness whipping in Detroit.
“It all came together for us in that home game against Denver,” said Nets coach Avery Johnson, who leads his gang against the Pacers again in a noon home start today. “Then we’ve taken a step back since then. But that’s been the label of our year, inconsistent.”
The inconsistency is not just game to game, but quarter to quarter. Slow starts in first and third quarters have been dooming the Nets all season.
“We’ve got to be more consistent defensively. We’ve got to start games better defensively,” said Anthony Morrow, who’s back starting as Johnson tries to juggle his rotations to cover the absence of reserve Jordan Farmar, who has missed five games with a back strain. Farmar will likely miss today as well, but was upgraded to questionable.
“We’ve got to be tougher down the stretch defensively,” Morrow added. “We have good games where we play great defense, have one of the top field goal defense in the league sometimes. And sometimes we kind of lack.”
That’s called inconsistent.
“It’s not puzzling,” said Johnson, who’ll see a Pacers team that compiled Nets opponent season highs in points (124) and field goal percentage (.625) in their last meeting Jan. 28, but has changed coaches since and seek to go 4-0 under Jim O’Brien’s replacement, Frank Vogel. “Not even frustrating. It is what it is. I’ll tell you what, two or three years from now, if we’re dealing with this, then it’s puzzling,”
“You can’t get frustrated. We’ve been playing better,” said Devin Harris. “It’s not like guys are just going through [the motions]. That would be frustrating if that were the case.”
And the Nets lack that firebrand Charles Oakley-type tough guy. Players and coaches agree that it must be done together.
“We need everybody,” Sasha Vujacic said. “We’re at the point where we have to learn how to be a team and cover for each other.”
“We’ve been getting away from what we’ve been doing well,” Brook Lopez said. “In the games we’ve [won], we really help each other, got each other’s back. We’ve gotten away from that. I’m as much a culprit as anyone.”
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Farmar went through a light workout after practice. While Johnson declared him out, he still gave a ray of hope. “I’m ruling him as out [today], but what’s the next step, questionable? He’s a little bit better but I’m not sure if he’s ready to play in the game, but we’ll see,” the coach said.