The month of December 2022 provided fans with a lot of entertainment and many highlights to comment on, with individual performances such as Luka Doncic’s 60-point triple double or Donovan Mitchell’s 71 points. But at the team level there has only been one franchise in charge: i Brooklyn Nets.
Coming from a turbulent summer with the oddities (to put it mildly) of Kyrie Irving and trade requests by Kevin Durant and protagonists of an at least disappointing start to the season which led to the dismissal of Steve Nash who therefore concludes his first experience as head coach without having won anything, the former New Jersey team still without NBA titles has seen his path in the regular season change completely starting from the last month of the old year. Suffice it to say that from 27 November the team now coached by Jacque Vaughn lost only 3 games out of the 20 played.
However, one of these three defeats occurred precisely in the last game, on October 14, by the Nets who saw considerable pressure on the shoulders of the team both because they played with Boston Celtics first in the Eastern Conference and the only team with Chicago to have beaten Brooklyn in December both because it was the first game after a very heavy shingle for anyone, let alone a team that seemed to have found the squaring of the circle after so many vicissitudes: Kevin Durant’s injury in the January 8 game against the Miami Heat.
Brooklyn Nets star Kevin Durant has been diagnosed with an MCL sprain in right knee and will be re-evaluated in two weeks.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) January 9, 2023
As you can read from the authoritative Shams Charania’s tweet, the former MVP of the NBA with the Golden State Warriors shirt as well as the last star of the late Seattle Supersonics (every occasion is good to remember a team that will always remain in the hearts of us who grew up with the NBA of nineties) will be re-evaluated in two weeks for a sprained ligament in his right knee and therefore the period in which coach Vaughn will have to do without him will certainly not be very short.
Bad business losing the one who held the weight of the team on his shoulders in the unconvincing start to the season especially considering that KD is going for 35 years. The first game without him saw, as mentioned, the defeat of his Nets at home against what, ranking in hand, is the best team in his Conference (as well as lacking Jaylen Brown and Al Horford for the occasion) who took off in a final quarter win 25-16.
But if a loss to the Celtics would have ultimately been likely even with Durant on the field, we are now grappling with the difficult task of finding an answer to the question: the Nets have the opportunity to continue their journey at the top of an Eastern Conference that this year seems more and more the most difficult group for the pretenders to that NBA ring ever achieved by the franchise to date?
Will Jacque Vaughn, Nets head coach since Nov. 1, be the Nets’ first titled head coach?
As far as I’m concerned, I anticipate the rest of the article by saying that the answer is an almost full yes. It cannot be said that Brooklyn is currently the number one favorite for the title but many aspects say that we are talking about a full-fledged contender.
The first factor is defense. We know that a team that wants to win not only cannot do without a defense among the best in the league but that this fundamental team level works if all the players have a clear understanding of their roles and are willing to perform them in the best possible way.
From this point of view there has been a gigantic change since the beginning of the yearjust think that the Nets defensive rating was 122.4 as of October 31 after 6 games played and was the worst in the league by gap while today it is 111.6, the ninth in the NBA (in this ranking to date the Cleveland Cavaliers lead with 109.2) What changed things was undoubtedly the change of coach but also the addition of Royce O’Neale and above all the great growth of Nic Claxton.
If the former Utah Jazz doesn’t need too much introduction as a 3&D capable of sacrificing himself on the outside, of adding that pinch of competitive wickedness often necessary to excel and just as often of taking heavy shots and placing them constituting an important alternative to the sacred monsters of Brooklyn (for O’Neale this year a round 41% from threebest percentage in his 6-year NBA career) the work of the young and slender starting center is also very important in my opinion.
Finally the Nets have understood that it is not worth entrusting the role of 5 to players like the elderly Blake Griffin or the demotivated Andre Drummond when you have the opportunity to grow at home a fast center in walking the field, athletic and with long levers which make him an excellent intimidator (2.6 blocks per match) Of course, 46.9% free throws make him unsuitable for the finals but Claxton in his first year as a regular starter he averaged double digits (11.8) with 73.6% from two and 8.3 rebounds. In a nutshell, so far, 23-year-old Nic has proved to be the right man for the Brooklyn frontcourt.
From Nets PR
Nic Claxton (three blocks) has now blocked at least three shots in seven straight games.-Longest streak of his career.
-Longest streak for a player this season.
-Longest streak for a Net since Shawn Bradley in March 1996 (franchise-record-tying 11 straight).
— NetsDaily (@NetsDaily) January 13, 2023
However, what can give better hope for Nets fans is the fact that just as in the autumn Kevin Durant was the absolute leader of the team now this role is covered in all respects by Kyrie Irving not only for his coat of arms but also because the former Cavaliers even with Durant by his side has become the main offensive reference of his team.
After the injuries and controversies, the month of December gave us all the best Irving, who can hit defenses in the first seconds of play or open spaces for Nets guns like Joe Harris and Seth Curry as well as raise the level of teammates representing a security for them (remember that the Japanese Yuta Watanabe even shoots 52% from three this year even if only with 3 average shots)
Last but not least, the understanding he has reached with Durant ensures that Kyrie is willing to share responsibilities with him, which in the past, to put it mildly, has not always happened as the disagreements demonstrate, albeit limited to coexistence on the parquet , which Irving had with LeBron James and which led him to leave Cleveland.
This last aspect is actually the one that leaves the biggest doubts about the Nets’ strength without Durant. Irving as mentioned has shown that he can play the role of leader in the best way and he will have to continue to do so without his partner as well as without a top player he has proven to trust.
And then there is Ben Simmons, one of the biggest question marks in recent years of the NBA and beyond. The Australian continues to shoot little (less than 6 shots per game) and to score even fewer (only 7.5 points per game, for the first time in his career in single digit average) with the icing on the cake of a terrible 41.3% free throws which then adds to that of Nic Claxton. However, his contribution in terms of defense, rebounds and assists remains respectable and shows an important perspective for Simmons: that of reinventing himself as a team man as did another first pick, Andrew Wiggins, at the Warriors.
Like Wiggins, he also found prolificacy in attack by putting himself at the service of Steph Curry and thus passing from an inconsistent scorer in Minnesota to a fundamental piece of the new Warriors even Simmons could restart from the dirty work to definitively find his dimension. However, doubts remain if only because the press is always ungenerous towards him (I read criticism of his game with Boston in which he did not score, but he fanned 13 assists and grabbed 9 rebounds) and it remains to be seen whether Ben will show that his shoulders are strong enough to withstand what will probably be a period of pressure for him without KD.
There is still some hesitation in defining them at the top of the NBA but the Nets to date have shown not only that they have rediscovered the motivation but also that they have great potential which they have noisily put on the field in the last month. We’ll see if Durant’s return is expected calmly and without drama with the team continuing to perform well; vice versa, even the return of the former Thunder couldn’t do much against an undesirable situation of confusion similar to that of the beginning of the season.
Under the cover of a quiet (so to speak) math teacher lies a crazy fanatic of everything that revolves around the segment, the NBA in the lead. Supporter of the Taiwan national team before discovering that the Street Hoop video game lied badly, later an adept of the Mavericks Fan For Life sect.
