BOSTON — The Nets didn’t just get massacred in Boston. They got exposed.
Brooklyn’s 136-86 embarrassment before a sellout crowd of 19,156 at TD Garden wasn’t just a one-off case of players getting caught looking ahead to the All-Star break.
It was a case of problems being laid bare.
“Yeah, I mean you gotta learn and fix the issue; that’s pretty much what it is. You can’t just let this one go and think like, ‘Oh, like, let it drop.’ No,” Mikal Bridges said. “Yeah, maybe if you lost towards the end, but you got beat by 50. It’s not just, ‘Let it go.’ A lot of s–t is not right, and you’ve got to fix it.”
Bridges and Cam Johnson are the only Nets who have played for a title, reaching the 2021 NBA Finals with Phoenix.
They’re acutely aware of what championship basketball looks like — and Bridges is painfully aware that this isn’t it.
Brooklyn trailed by as many as 56 points in falling to 21-33.
The Nets very easily could’ve suffered the worst defeat in their history — a 52-point mauling by Houston back in 1978 — if the Celtics hadn’t taken pity on them and dribbled out the clock not once but twice in the waning seconds.
The Nets took a beating, trailing by 18 in the first quarter, 37 in the second and a mind-bending 46 to end the third.
But 56 in the fourth looked like a misprint. Or a nightmare.
“We lost the game, didn’t have no physicality to start the game, which starts with me,” Dennis Schröder said. “But at the end of the day, they’re a hell of a team. And yet we didn’t make plays, we wasn’t physical. They got everywhere they wanted on the defensive side, you know, and we played offense, they was physical with us and we didn’t get to our spots.
“They just outplayed us. If we would have lost by one, it would have been the same way. A loss is a loss of course. They kicked our ass. But everybody can go now to vacation, see family, get their energy back and regroup and we’ve still got a mission to make the playoffs.”
Right now, the playoffs — or even play-in — is looking more like something the Nets won’t have to worry about.
The Nets trail Atlanta by 2 ½ for the final play-in spot heading into the All-Star break, and just 28 games on the slate when they come out.
And nothing about this effort — or frankly this season — engenders a lot of confidence that this is the squad to overturn even this modest deficit.
Jayson Tatum had just 20 points a night after lighting the Nets up for 41.
But he was barely needed, because the Nets frankly didn’t show up.
Cam Thomas and Schröder — making his first start as a Net — predictably struggled on defense.
Derrick White had 27 points, and backup Peyton Pritchard had a game-high 28 on 11 of 16 shooting, 6 of 9 from deep.
But arguably just as concerning for the Nets were Thomas and Schröder’s offensive woes.
Thomas, who entered the game second on the team with 21.5 points per game, was held to just five on 1 of 9 shooting.
And Schröder, starting with Ben Simmons out, had just four points and one assist.
Trendon Watford led Brooklyn with 15, Bridges the only other Net in double figures with 10.
Their offense looked in abysmal disarray, Bridges saying they need a game plan with Simmons and another without.
“We got to know what we’re doing, we got to come as a team, as coaches and figuring out a game plan. It can’t be the same with everybody. It can’t be the same; everybody’s different,” Bridges said. “With Ben out there, it’s different. He could dribble handoff and stop because how teams guard him. We got four guards out there with [Nic] Claxton, it’s a different game. So just kind of know how to play that way and adjust off that.”
The Nets stumbled right from the start, down 14-4 out of the gate.
Brooklyn was just 2 of 9 from the floor, 0 for 3 from behind the arc. It just got worse.
The deficit swelled to 26-8 quickly on Tatum’s finger roll with 3:25 in the first.
White’s pull-up 3-pointer made it 66-29 with a half-minute left in the half.
The deficit swelled to 77-32 in the third when Tatum found Sam Hauser for a 3-pointer.
And by the fourth the Celtics’ bench was having its way.
