Nets’ Dennis Smith Jr. says team ‘strayed away’ from offensive success
The Brooklyn Nets have not yet found a way to turn their season around and the clock is ticking on how much time they have to get back to winning basketball. After what happened on Sunday, it seems that the Nets are back to the drawing board with regards to getting back to their winning ways.
In Sunday’s 125-114 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers, Brooklyn had one of the worst, if not the worst, closes to a game in recent memory as they allowed the Clippers to close the game on a 22-0 run. Over the course of this season, Nets head coach Jacque Vaughn has varied between letting his guys play through their struggles and using quick timeouts to give his players a mental reset.
Vaughn chose to go with the former and while it was not the right decision to not use the timeout, the fourth-quarter collapse was about more than whether a timeout was called. Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue closed the game with a lineup of James Harden, Norman Powell, Paul George, Kawhi Leonard, and Russell Westbrook and it was easy to see why.
Once that lineup was on the floor, they completely shut down Brooklyn’s offense by switching everything on defense, as Nets guard Mikal Bridges pointed out, and Brooklyn did not have an answer. Nets backup guard Dennis Smith Jr., who put up 13 points and three rebounds in the loss, tried to verbalize what happened down the stretch:
“I think it’s about how we was getting the shots. We kind of strayed away from that and we started trying to hunt matchups, going one-on-one instead of just letting the letting the game flow, letting it come to you. We went away from that and that’s when it got tough.”
