After taking one of the most humiliating beatings in team history, Jordi Fernández challenged his Nets to show more fight.
Brooklyn fought its way through not one but two overtimes, coming up just short 130-126 against the Celtics on Friday night before a sellout crowd of 17,727 at Barclays Center.
The Nets (12-31) have dropped a dozen of their last 14, the worst a 120-66 loss Wednesday to the Knicks. It was the second-largest margin of defeat in franchise history, and their lowest scoring output since a 90-65 loss to Miami on March 12, 2005. To a man, they’d acknowledged the need to redeem themselves.
“Yeah, it’s about how you respond. Obviously, you don’t like to feel embarrassed. It was a tough feeling,” said Fernández. “But we were out there together and the best thing you can do is [Thursday] watch some film, talk to each other, get some work done this morning, do it again and go out there and respond as a group. … Once again, how you respond is how you should be judged.”
The Nets responded. But they didn’t win.
Michael Porter Jr. led the Nets with 30 points and eight rebounds to bounce back from a poor night in the Garden, while rookie Nolan Traore — playing down the stretch instead of Egor Dëmin — added a career-high 21 points, though he’ll rue a missed free throw in the first overtime that let the Celtics force the second. That’s where the Nets lost.
Down by a point in the second overtime, Sam Hauser’s 3-pointer left the Nets in a 128-124 hole with 1:51 left. Porter cut the deficit in half, but Peyton Pritchard got free inside off a Jaylen Brown feed with 44.2 seconds remaining.
Pritchard (32 points) and Brown (27) led Boston.
Porter — who was held to just a dozen points in the Garden on 4-for-14 shooting — shouldered much of the blame for that loss to the Knicks, admitting his energy level hadn’t been where it should have been. Friday he came out fired up.
There was a logo 3-pointer to put Brooklyn up 21-19 with 4:18 left in the first quarter. And an empathic driving dunk 46 seconds later.
“[Wednesday] night I texted the guys and just told them, ‘Yo, that’s my fault.’ I’ve got to come in with that energy,” said Porter. “When we come in with the right energy, we know we can compete with anybody. It doesn’t matter who, what lineups are in and out, who we’re playing with. We know that we have pieces that can compete with any team. We’ve shown that.
“So I told them [Wednesday was] my fault, and let’s get back to being a competitive group. We’ve been to Boston, beat Boston; been to Minnesota, beat Minnesota, and competed in a lot of games that slipped away from us. So I told them, let’s get back to it and realize when we’re locked in and taking care of business, we compete with anybody.”
Brooklyn led much of the night.
Trailing 36-35, the Nets reeled off an 18-6 run to seize the lead. Porter’s 3-pointer off a feed by Nic Claxton (18 points, nine rebounds) put them ahead 53-42.
Much of the third quarter saw Brooklyn trying to hold Boston at bay.
A Porter 3 gave them a 91-90 edge with 6:49 left in regulation, but it’s a lead they couldn’t hold. Brooklyn coughed up an 11-0 run, capped by Pritchard’s 3-pointer off a Brown feed that put the Nets in a 10-point hole with three minutes left.
But Brooklyn climbed out to force overtime on a Claxton putback dunk off a Porter miss.
In the first extra stanza, the Nets fell behind 112-108 on a Hugo Gonzalez bucket.
The Nets reeled off a 9-0 run to take a 117-112 lead on a Ziaire Williams free throw with 7.9 seconds left, but couldn’t hold it. A Gonzalez corner 3-pointer with :00.4 on the clock knotted it and forced a second overtime.
That’s where they finally ran out of gas.
The Nets stayed fifth in the lottery race, 1 ½ games behind fourth-place Sacramento and moved two ahead of sixth-place Utah.
