What's right with the Nets

Things are looking up in Brooklyn for a change. Why?

Good morning. Thank you for the kind words on the 3-year anniversary of GMIB on Substack! Let’s basketball.

The Song of Love, Giorgio de Chirico, 1914

The Brooklyn Nets have won a league-best nine straight and 13 of their last 14. They beat the Cavaliers on Monday to take sole possession of No. 3 in the East. They are just a half-game behind the Bucks for No. 2 and two games out of first place. They have the No. 5 offense, a league-average defense and the No. 7 net rating in the whole league. Kevin Durant is an MVP contender (in a season replete with MVP contenders). Kyrie Irving has been a consistent offensive powerhouse since returning in late November. Ben Simmons is providing good playmaking and excellent individual defense. The other parts mostly fit.

This is the optimal vision of the Brooklyn Nets, one that seemed so unlikely when Durant was requesting a trade, Irving was looking at declining his player option and Simmons was more than a year removed from playing in an NBA game.

Oh, and when Steve Nash was the coach.

It would be very easy to pin most of the Nets’ early season struggles on Nash, who was fired on November 1. Brooklyn was 2-5 at that point, and are 20-7 since. But the turnaround wasn’t instant. Perhaps the Nets’ worst loss of the season, in which the Sacramento Kings dropped 153 points on them, came under Jacque Vaughn.

That said, the Nets look much better prepared and cohesive under Vaughn. Durant loudly complained that under Nash the team didn’t really prepare for opponents, and to be honest it’s easy to understand why Nash struggled with that element of his job. Nash hadn’t really been in the league in the prior decade, and lots has changed tactically. Nash had never been a real bench coach — he has a development role in Golden State — and didn’t seem willing to hold any players to account. As a player, Nash himself didn’t need (or want) to be held to account, having thrived under Don Nelson, Mike D’Antoni and Alvin Gentry. But Durant wanted something different, and the motley roster needed something different. It appears Vaughn read the room and is providing that.

The biggest change to me really looks like a mix of comfort and order. Everything is fitting into place, but not in a forced way. There’s an ease to the team. And of course, that stems from Durant, who is both one of the greatest players ever and one of the easiest fits ever.

A serious and underrated part of Durant’s legacy of excellence is that you don’t need to fit certain pieces around him, or rewrite your whole offense to suit his abilities. You plug him into any collection of players and he will do what he does. Back during Peak OKC about 8-10 years ago, I used to compare Durant to a big man despite him playing small forward almost exclusively. The logic was that he was, like Dirk Nowitzki or Tim Duncan, just as happy to be set up by a teammate, to operate without the ball in his hands, even though he was fully capable of creating shots for himself and others. The difference is that instead of posting up like pivots of lore he’d spot up on the perimeter and be ready when called upon by then Russell Westbrook and later Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, James Harden and Irving.

From ease comes comfort, and from comfort comes fit, and from fit comes success. An offense powered by Durant Whenever You Need Him plus Irving and a mix of shooters, supplemental creators and finishers: it’s easy to see why that works.

It looks like the Nets are 1-2 players short of a top-10 defense — a rim-protecting or space-erasing center and another long wing defender would help. But Simmons is still capable of shutting down very good offensive players.