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Back when I was in college (and stone tablets were all the rage), I had a friend who would attend the opening day or two of class and then conveniently find other things to occupy his time for the remaining weeks of the quarter. Finals time would come around, and my buddy would set out on a daunting journey through the school library to find someone he recalled seeing in those early classes to ask what the final essay topic was. Invariably, he’d track someone down, and because he was smarter than someone like me, he’d be able to cobble enough together to pass the class. And while that friend is still one of my favorite people in the world, he never did earn his degree. Nothing wrong with that, but I do wonder from time to time if he thinks that is a missing piece of his life given all the money he poured into the school.
Those memories came back to me as I tried to wrap my head around this Nets season. The Nets are entering the final weeks and face an exam tonight against a Bucks team that didn’t skip most of the standard team-building classes.
In a general sense, these Nets aren’t all that different from most elite NBA teams in de-emphasizing the regular season. If you have the talent to make a deep postseason run, if you expect to be playing hard minutes deep into May and June, it makes sense to take things easy on a random night in March. Time and again, we’ve seen LeBron James do exactly that and still end up in the Finals. But the Nets have taken the practice to the nth degree. It seems teammates don’t matter, the coach doesn’t matter, fans don’t matter, honesty doesn’t matter.
