Nets fans couldn’t have written a better three-game scenario.
Brooklyn’s win over the Houston Rockets on Tuesday made it three in a row for a team looking for chemistry and continuity at the end of the season.
The winning streak includes a 28-point come-from-behind victory over the No. 2 Boston Celticsand a convincing win over the same Charlotte Hornets team that ended the Knicks’ nine-game winning streak without star guard LaMelo Ball.
And now comes a dose of reality: The Houston Rockets have the worst record in all of basketball and are the first team to reach 50 losses this season. They will be the worst team in the NBA for the third straight season if they finish the year at their current pace.
The Hornets might as well be in the same boat without Ball. Their win over the Knicks it was their first since the star point guard suffered a season-ending ankle injury. The Nets easily shut out the Hornets and held them to under 90 points.
There’s no doubt that the win over the Celtics was convincing — even if Boston took its foot off the gas in the first half.
Can the Nets recreate that success for the remaining four games on their road trip?
It won’t be easy.
That’s because Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks are next, and Antetokounmpo just smothered the Nets all over the place for 33 points and 15 rebounds in the Bucks. double digit win at Barclays Center on February 28th.
The Nets have undoubtedly begun to find their identity on both ends of the floor — but it will take more than self-realization to stop Antetokounmpo, who may be the league’s most valuable player, even if the voters have tired of voting for him.
The Nets then travel to Minnesota to face the Timberwolves, who are quietly climbing up the Western Conference standings and are just a half-game behind the Dallas Mavericks and Golden State Warriors for the fifth and sixth seeds, which insulates a team from having to participate in the sudden death Play-In tournament.
The Timberwolves, however, have largely been a one-man show with Karl-Anthony Towns now 100 days sidelined with a serious calf injury. Still, the Nets will be playing in their second straight game, and Anthony Edwards — who is averaging about 25 points, six rebounds and five assists per game — is a handful at all three levels offensively.
The Nets round out their road trip with a test: traveling to Denver to play at high altitude against the presumptive three-time MVP in Nikola Jokic. The Nuggets have the best record in the Western Conference and are favorites to become title contenders.
The Nets wrap up their trip to Oklahoma City by taking on star guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who is averaging 31.7 points per game as one of the league’s up-and-coming NBA faces.
All the while, the Nets are battling other Eastern Conference teams for playoff positioning. As of Wednesday afternoon, the Nets and Knicks were tied in the loss column, with the Knicks holding two more wins on the season. The Nets sit in sixth place in the East and are 2.5 games ahead of the seventh-seeded Miami Heat. They are five games back of the eighth seed, meaning it would take a five-game losing streak — plus a five-game winning streak by the Atlanta Hawks — for the Nets to risk falling to the eighth spot.
A losing streak is not off the table. The Nets have the ninth-strongest remaining schedule in all of basketball and must play a number of legitimate title contenders in the 17 games remaining in the regular season.
If they’ve proven anything all season, though, it’s that Brooklyn has a backbone. The Nets won’t go down without a fight, and that should be enough to secure a playoff spot this season — although the idea of a championship in Brooklyn has long since left the borough.
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