It’s always dangerous to base any judgments off one game within an 82-game NBA regular season, or off one game over a four-year period.
But it was very hard, if not impossible, to do so watching the Nets lose 95-88 to the Jazz on Sunday evening at Barclays Center, dropping their third straight game and falling further out of the Eastern Conference playoff race.
That was because of the presence of the Jazz, the team that shipped Deron Williams to the Nets a little more than four years ago in a move that was supposed to be the foundation for the contender the Nets were going to be upon arriving in Brooklyn in 2012.
Right now, though, the Nets look nothing like a contender, in part because Williams looks nothing like the foundation of one. With Sunday’s loss, the Nets are three games behind Charlotte for seventh and 2 ¹/₂ games behind Miami and Indiana for eighth in the lowly Eastern Conference. At 11 games under .500, they are lucky to be within shouting distance of a playoff spot.
“I’m trying not to go the way of a couple of coaches that are in beer commercials,” Nets coach Lionel Hollins said. “But we are just trying to play well and be consistent.
“If we play well enough and we’re good enough, we’ll make the playoffs. But if we don’t, we won’t.”
If the last three games are any indication, they won’t, and Williams has been a big reason why. After a strong stretch of play to begin the post All-Star break schedule, including scoring 23 in a win in Dallas and 22 in a win at home over Golden State, Williams has fallen apart along with his team over the past three games.
In the three losses, Williams is averaging nine points while shooting a combined 7-for-30 (23.3 percent) from the field. He’s averaging 6.3 assists and three turnovers as the Nets self-destructed down the stretch in blowing a 15-point fourth-quarter lead against the Suns on Friday before allowing a 14-3 Utah run in the fourth that brought the Jazz to within one Sunday.
“It seems like we take one step forward and two steps back,” Williams said after finishing with six points, five rebounds and four assists in 30 minutes. “We beat two good teams … and then we lose these three in a row, and slide further and further back.”
While Williams hasn’t been quite as bad as his recent numbers, his production — 13.2 points and 6.2 assists on 38.2 percent shooting overall and 35.8 percent from 3-point range — has fallen short of what the Nets were expecting when they re-signed him to a five-year contract worth nearly $100 million a little less than three years ago.
“I wish I knew,” Williams said when asked about the team’s recent struggles. “We just seem out of sync out there. We don’t seem like we’re playing very well together on either end of the floor. It is what it is.”
While the Nets try to find a way back into the East’s playoff picture, the Jazz are in an entirely different place. Utah is 10 games under .500, but has played in the much more difficult Western Conference, and with a younger roster with a higher ceiling.
Gordon Hayward led the Jazz with 24 points Sunday, while former Net Derrick Favors — one of the pieces acquired in the Williams trade — had 22 points, eight rebounds and four assists. Second-year center Rudy Gobert had four points, 11 rebounds, five assists and two blocks and rookie point guard Dante Exum had 14 points and four rebounds.
Those players are all 24 and under, making them younger than the key young piece the Nets are trying to re-tool around, 25-year-old Mason Plumlee. The Jazz also have control of their first-round draft picks, which the Nets won’t be able to say until 2019.
The trade made sense when the Nets made it, as did re-signing Williams. It’s something any other team in the league would have done. But now, he and the Nets find themselves in a far different place than they anticipated.