On the one hand: a raging inferno. A two-man power trip capable of pulverizing opponents with perfect offensive play, hitting the hardest shots imaginable, serving teammates scoring chances on a silver platter, and looking like the kind of unsolvable fireball the one can produce mastery.
On the other hand: a misfiring engine. A team that stagnates when their Celestials don’t throw lightning, that commits sloppy turnovers and makes careless mistakes, and that can go from dominance to dropping 65 points in one half in the blink of an eye.
Two sides, but the same coin. Ladies and gentlemen, your Brooklyn Nets: the newly minted No. 7 seed in the Eastern Conference playoff bracket and the NBA’s first Rorschach Test.
The Nets did what everyone expected on Tuesday, defeating the wounded Cleveland Cavaliers 115-108 at Barclays Center in the first game of the NBA’s 2022 play-in tournament. They did as everyone expected due to the strength of their offense, shooting 53.6 percent from the floor as a team, giving up 33 assists on 45 field goals scored, and torching the Cavs with 119.8 points per 100 ball possession heads and off shoulders above the mark that led the NBA during the regular season.
Kyrie Irving didn’t miss his first shot until just over 10 minutes into the fourth quarter; by that time he had already made 12. While Irving was engulfed in flames, Kevin Durant made peace with doing everything else – attracting defensive attention and moving the ball to set up wide-open shots, cleaning the glass, protecting the rim – and he presents the all-around Game he created to become arguably the greatest basketball player alive.
As the Cavs held Irving captive in the pick-and-roll, Andre Drummond slipped into space, receiving pocket passes and throwing down dunks. As they tried to force the ball out of Durant’s hands near half-court, he kicked it forward to Bruce Brown, who rolled briefly to the free-throw line, attacked four-for-three and minced Cleveland’s backline. And when JB Bickerstaff’s team sold out to close both the initial action and the switch, Durant was there, waiting to remind them of his inevitability.
Watch the machine work like this and you begin to wonder how an opponent standing in its way could possibly succeed. But then you look at the result and realize that KD’s iso-killer is all that stopped Cleveland from making it a two-ball possession game with just four minutes to go. And you’re wondering why a team with two future Hall of Famers going berserk had such a hard time knocking out an opponent who lost the season in an eight-of-11 loss, with the No. 20 offense last month and without all-star center Jarrett Allen, who was been sidelined for five weeks with a broken finger.
The Cavs gave up 40 points with 23 possessions in the first quarter. They had no answer for Irving, who finished with 34 points on 12-for-15 shooting with 12 assists, or Durant, who added 25 points and 11 assists with five rebounds, three blocks and two steals. In three quarters, they had totaled 16 points on 25 shots from Caris LeVert, Lauri Markkanen, Isaac Okoro and Cedi Osman — aka their total wing rotation.
And yet, thanks to some uninspired Brooklyn games in the second and third quarters, and at the mercy of the basketball gods — chiefly a young basketball god named Darius Garland, who got the Cavs off the mat by scoring 24 of his 34 points after the break — Cleveland still had a handful of chances to reduce Brooklyn’s once 22-point lead to five in the fourth quarter.
However, they never could; Every time they tried, the Nets got a stop or a bucket and held off the Cavs long enough to make it to the final buzzer, sending Cleveland into an eliminator on Friday against the loser of the 9-a-side. 10 game Wednesday matchup between the Hawks and Hornets.
Brooklyn doesn’t have to apologize for that; “Survive and Advance” is the name of the game this time of year, and Steve Nash’s crew did. Still, the Nets gave up 60 points in the paint to a Cavs team without its all-star center. It took them 42 minutes of phenomenal play from their two superstars on Tuesday, plus a 40-minute near-triple-double from Brown, and centers Drummond and Nic Claxton combined for 29 points and 17 rebounds just to defeat an injury-plagued side that’s struggling in the halffield and runs on fumes. Durant sat just six minutes and 21 seconds against the Cavs; The nets were outperformed by nine points. Does that sound like a championship contender to you?
Regardless, it’s a playoff team that has now earned a first-round appointment with the second-seeded Celtics. It’s a role reversal rematch of last season’s opening round series; at that time the nets were the no. 2 seeds. A lot has changed.
James Harden, who averaged just under 28 and 11 this series, is now in Philadelphia. His alleged successor, Ben Simmons, spent Tuesday in Street clothes the color of envy, and hasn’t played an NBA game in almost 10 months. Joe Harris, who played 35 minutes a night and scored 51.5 percent from 3 in that series, is out for the year. His rumored replacement, Seth Curry, remained goalless in 33 minutes on Tuesday and looked far less than 100 per cent as he played on a bulky left ankle he says has been bothering him for months.
Perhaps most importantly, the Celtics no longer start with Romeo Langford and Tristan Thompson or rely on Jabari Parker’s 15 minutes. They don’t stutter into the playoffs; They’re on the rise, entering the postseason not only as the holders of the NBA No. 1 defense but also the East’s best record and the league’s best net number since Jan. 1.
The Celtics won’t go into Round 1 at full strength, however: Center Robert Williams III, one of the lynchpins of the switch-everything scheme they’ve used to choke opposing offense, is continuing rehab after playing the last seven games missed the season with a torn meniscus in his left knee. Bruce Brown stressed the importance of Williams’ injury after Tuesday’s win, telling reporters that without Williams, the Celtics would be out “have less presence in the paint” and that Brooklyn “can attack Al Horford and [Daniel] Theis”, Williams replacement at 5.
If that sounded like a surprisingly matter-of-fact delivery of bulletin board material to an opponent who’s been among the top three teams in the NBA for the past three months, you’re not alone. After Brown left the podium, Durant came up and asked reporters, “What did Bruce Brown say? Someone told me they said something I don’t like.” After hearing the quote, KD shook his head. dismissed Brown’s assessment as “caffeine pride talk.” and offered his own take on Theis and Horford: “The two guys…they can do the same stuff [as Williams]. It’s not going to be easy, I’m telling you.”
“Same stuff” isn’t quite right; Durant knows that neither Theis nor Horford are anywhere near the kind of feather-heeled shot-blocking threat that Williams can be. But it sounds like he also knows that even without Time Lord, with the quartet of Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Marcus Smart and Horford on the floor, the Cs have been cracking up at a top-five rate — and maybe that with Theis in Time Lord’s place, Boston blitzed his opponents by more than 33 points per 100. A Nets team that must rely on a limping Curry, a fresh-from-COVID Goran Dragic and rookie Kessler Edwards to survive non-KD minutes could face some tough sledding against an opponent of Boston’s caliber . Come Sunday afternoon, the fans who ended Tuesday with chants the Celtics want might wish they had been more careful about what they wished for.
Unless, of course, KD and Kyrie just continue to score close to 60 points on 68 percent shooting together for the next few months. That we can’t entirely dismiss this as a possibility is why so many find it so difficult to leave the nets; However, that winning is essentially a requirement for this team is why so many find them so hard to believe in. Whether you think the inferno or the backfire is more important, they’re both there; it really is all there. Contender or hypocrite, finalist or cheater: a universe of possible outcomes and interpretations, all in black and white.
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