CLEVELAND — The Nets don’t do the moral victory thing. But they had to settle for one Tuesday, when LeBron James and his Cavs snatched one away from them in the final minute.
The Nets took the lead in the waning seconds of a back-and-forth slugfest, but they couldn’t make enough stops to hold it, losing 129-123 before a sellout crowd of 20,562 at Quicken Loans Arena.
“Frustrated. We never found a solution to stop them. It’s tough. George Hill and LeBron obviously had great games, and that pick-and-roll late,” Nets coach Kenny Atkinson said. “But I think we’re happy with the way we competed. We got a win [Monday] night. [Tuesday], we had another opportunity to win, but we couldn’t close the deal.”
The Nets (20-42) couldn’t close it because they couldn’t get a stop. They saw James notch a game-high 31 points, a 12 rebounds and 11 assists. And with the game knotted at 111 they saw the Cavs hit five of six shots and all six free throws over the final 2:34.
“They made a couple more plays and they pushed through and got the better end of it,” Rondae Hollis-Jefferson said.
Allen Crabbe had put the Nets ahead 121-120 with just 56 seconds left — but that proved a minute too long for them to hold that lead. It lasted just 16 seconds, until Rodney Hood hit a tough go-ahead fadeaway over long-armed center Jarrett Allen, drawing a foul and converting the free throw.
The Nets would never lead again.
“I thought Jarrett did a great job on his closeout with Hood, kept him in front and then Hood makes a heck of a shot,” Atkinson said. “I wish he didn’t foul him, but that’s what we’re learning.”
They got a team-high 25 points from D’Angelo Russell, but he got trapped in the corner and heaved up a desperation shot with 20 seconds to play, looking for a call instead of a basket. He got neither.
“D’Angelo got it in the corner. Hill gets up into him. I’m not going to make a judgment there. I think D’Angelo tried to draw the foul, but it didn’t work out,” Atkinson said.
“I was just trying to get the ball in play, make a basketball play. I’m not going to get into talking about the refs or anything like that. I learned my lesson,” Russell said. “I thought it was what it was; they thought otherwise. It turned out how it did.
“I just tried to get the ball. I was already deep corner, I wasn’t trying to intentionally walk out of bounds, or fall out of bounds, however you want to put that.”
The Cavs pushed the ball upcourt as Russell lay on the floor, and James — in the midst of a triple-double — calmly buried both of his free throws between chants of “MVP! MVP!” That pushed the lead to 125-121 with 16 seconds left in regulation, and Brooklyn couldn’t get it to overtime.
After the Nets had beaten the Cavs (36-24) at Barclays Center in October, they saw James beat them with 18 straight points in November. He was every bit as good Tuesday night, and they still nearly came out victorious.
Brooklyn ran a procession of bodies at James, from Crabbe to DeMarre Carroll to Hollis-Jefferson. It didn’t help.
In a slugfest with 25 lead changes and nine ties, James and Hill (26 points) landed the biggest punches.
James became just the 11th player to notch 8,000 assists, and averaged a triple-double for the month of February — the first time he’d ever done so and surpassed Wilt Chamberlain as the oldest player in NBA history to accomplish it.
“It’s good to see, but we want to come out and win those games. We’re not really into moral victories,” said Caris LeVert, who had 18 points. “We know we’re getting better. But we’d like to see it in the win-loss column.”