The Brooklyn Nets Sadness Index continues with a good month for Boston’s helpful assistants
What better way to celebrate the end of March and the start of Spring (allegedly) than once more reviewing the state of Celtics fans’ second “favorite” team? If you’re not privy to the process the brief synopsis is thus. The Celtics are good. The Brooklyn Nets are terrible, and Boston Celtics has the rights to their first round draft pick in each of the next two years. That means they can compete in the present and not hinder any opportunities for acquiring a franchise-altering talent through the draft in the future. Following two basketball teams all year is an exhausting task, so we’re simplifying it for you by providing monthly updates on what is happening in Brooklyn.
What a time to be alive for Nets fans. Jeremy Lin is back and playing well, and the whole team is better off for it. Brooklyn finished March with a 7-10 record. That translates to a .412 winning percentage, better than the Cleveland Cavaliers during that time, and more than twenty-five percentage points better than their mark for the rest of the year. They’re still a full five games behind the next worst team in the league, but suddenly finishing anything other than dead last has gone from a seeming impossibility to just a pipe dream.
That isn’t ideal for Celtics supporters, but there isn’t any reason to panic yet. Even if the Lakers don’t win another game, the Nets would still have to come up with victories in five of their final seven games. The likelihood that Boston ends up with anything but the best odds at the number one pick in the draft is still quite low.
Brooklyn’s late season uptick in performance might point to reason to be somewhat concerned for those taking the long view though. At least those hoping for two straight last place finishes. There seems to be something to coach Kenny Atkinson’s offensive system when the team doesn’t have a complete disaster running the show at the point. That shouldn’t be too much of a surprise given his education at Hawks University.
For all their flaws, and there are oh so many, the Nets at least appear to be moving in the direction of modern basketball. They don’t have the firepower to make their fast-running, three-point-heavy offense work, and they certainly don’t have the defensive personnel to make it matter if they did, but there is something to be said for doing smart things. Brooklyn’s front office has utterly failed in that department, but it’s coaching staff has not.
Celtics fans shouldn’t be overly concerned by this. Coaches can lean into all the forward thinking tactics they want, but if they don’t have talent there is limited potential for impact. What seems like intelligent experimentation has only translated into fragments of glimpses of competent play. That is to say, the Nets are still really bad. The sadness index dipped a bit this month, but no one is happy in Brooklyn.
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