HARLEM, N.Y. – At first it didn’t look all that great. In fact, at times things got downright ugly. With championship expectations and lottery-team results, Jason Kidd and the Brooklyn Nets came out of the gates as the biggest disappointment of the 2013-14 NBA season.
After making the biggest splash of the off-season by acquiring former Celtics Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, hiring the organization’s greatest NBA player, Jason Kidd, to be their new head coach a year after playing for the crosstown Knicks. Along with bringing in veteran reserves Andrei Kirilenko, Jason Terry and Shaun Livingston, the Nets made little waves once the season gave way.
The Nets, supposedly the team to dethrone the Miami Heat’s reign over the Eastern Conference, made more headlines off the court than on. An ugly public breakup between Kidd and assistant coach Lawrence Frank came after players questioned their roles on the team. Kidd was then fined $50,000 for telling second-year guard Tyshawn Taylor to bump into him and spill his cup of soda in the efforts of getting another timeout in a loss to the Los Angeles Lakers. Couple the integration of new players adjusting to new roles and injuries to Brooklyn cornerstones, Deron Williams and Brook Lopez, and it’s easy to understand why the Nets struggled.
They couldn’t get out of their own way.
But all of that is so 2013. It’s been a new Nets team in the New Year, as they’ve won eight of their last nine in the month of January with marquee victories over Oklahoma City, Golden State and Miami.
What’s been the difference in the Nets recent surge? Center Andray Blatche, who’s been valuable off the bench, said it’s been Kidd gaining confidence with his new position that’s sparked everything.
“It’d be a tough transition for anybody [to go straight from player to coach], but he figured it out and got it together. The guys are buying into what he’s selling. And it’s been defense. That’s been the difference,” Blatche told PPI from Atmos in Harlem on Thursday.
Defense is a good place to start. Since the ball dropped the Nets have given up 92.2 points per game, 8.2 points less than their season average. In fact, the Nets are above their season average in blocks per game (4.5), turnovers (15.3) and steals (8) in 2014.
But more than defense, the team’s humility may be what’s fueling this run the most. With over 300,000 minutes played, over 100,000 points scored, 35 All-Star appearances and three NBA titles combined on the team, humility was a task that’d take some time. The Nets had figure out if Williams, Joe Johnson or Pierce would get the last shot of the game. And how many touches for Garnett? Is one of those players going to have to come off the bench? Would they be willing to do that? How do we incorporate our second and third units?
Those questions were answered by what Blatche would describe as “checking egos at the door”.
“Everybody checks their ego at the door. It’s not about ‘I’m this person’ or ‘I’m that person’. No one cares if they shoot the ball a thousand times. Just win,” he said.
No action speaks more to their collective goal than Williams, the unquestioned leader and $100 million point guard in Brooklyn, agreeing to take a reserve role as he eases back from an ankle injury while the team was surging.
“That goes to show just what I said,” Blatche said. “We’re not concerned with our own personal agenda. We just want the team to be winning. Even though we started off slow, we’re digging ourselves out of the hole right now.”
Blatche has been a big part of digging his team out of that hole. He’s averaging 12 points and 6 rebounds in 22 minutes, helping fill the void at center left by Lopez’s season-ending foot surgery. Throughout the Nets winning ways, he’s been a spark off the bench shooting 53% from the field while upping his scoring and rebounding totals to 13 and 7, respectively.
“I’m just being aggressive. I feel real confident on offense. It feels like everything’s been going my way,” he said.
Everything has been going the Nets’ way in 2014, who currently hold the seventh spot in the Eastern Conference playoff hunt. Blatche believes Brooklyn is just scratching the surface.
“It’s so early, there’s no telling where we might be a couple months from now. We could rattle off a 10-game winning streak and we’d be the number 3 seed.”
