Brooklyn is the coldest team in the NBA. And the hottest team in the tank race.
The Nets looked more interested in enjoying South Beach than playing basketball, hammered 124-98 by Miami in front of a sellout crowd of 19,700 at Kaseya Center on Tuesday night.
It was the kind of desultory performance one would expect after a night out on South Beach.
But now the Nets have a day off before facing this same Heat team again on Thursday, mired in the league-worst nine-game losing skid.
“[I want to see them] ready to fight,” coach Jordi Fernández had said beforehand. “We’ll face a top four defensive team, a team that’s very physical, that they use their hands very well, that you’re going to have to handle their physicality. And that’s good for us. It’s going to help us. It’s going to make us bring the best of ourselves. We want to compete.”
There wasn’t a lot of competitiveness out of the Nets (15-46) on Tuesday. They were utterly ineffectual against Miami’s aggressive zone defense.
Brooklyn shot just 38.4 percent and 6-for-32 from deep. They committed 18 turnovers and got outscored 20-11 off those giveaways.
Michael Porter Jr. was held to just nine points, shooting 3-for-17 and 0-for-9 from behind the arc. Noah Clowney led the Nets with 17 points, and Ziaire Williams added 16.
Rookie point guard Nolan Traore had 14 points but committed six turnovers without a single assist against that Bam Adebayo-led defense. With Egor Dëmin out, Ben Saraf was the backup point guard and had six more turnovers.
While the Nets are tanking, the Heat are laser-focused on playoff seeding. Adebayo had 23 points, nine rebounds and a career-high six steals while Tyler Herro added 22.
Brooklyn was down just 52-47 with 5:15 left in the first half, but they then gave up a 13-2 run to lose contact.
Andrew Wiggins capped the run with a midrange jumper that left the Nets in a 65-49 hole with 1:16 in the half.
Trailing 93-80, another 13-2 run saw the game blown open.
The Nets saw the deficit swell to 27 in the waning minutes.
The Nets moved into a tie for second in the lottery standings.
Brooklyn pulled within 1 1/2 games of Sacramento pending the Kings’ clash with Phoenix, and into a tie with idle Indiana for second.
“It has to feel like you got better every day. And a lot of times that adversity is what makes you better, right? Because if you don’t struggle, probably it means that you didn’t work hard enough. It’s a little bit of a happy medium,” Fernández said. “But a lot of these guys are very young. It’s never perfect. We have to encourage them and we have to challenge them.”
Dëmin, who turned 20 on Tuesday and got serenaded in Spanish by his teammates, sat a second straight game managing his plantar fascia.
“Right now he’s not good to go play, and we’ll see what the next step is,” Fernández said. “You see it a lot, as a lot of people talk about the rookie wall. … It’s important to do what’s best for his body, and then move forward for him.”
While Dëmin needs rest, Drake Powell needs playing time. That’s why he was sent to G-League Long Island.
“It’s a matter of playing more minutes. It’s important for their bodies to get used to. It’s not the same playing 15, 20 and then playing 30 for [several] weeks,” Fernández said. “We want him to be vertical into the rim, to use less dribbles, to be ready to shoot, to be very physical, to use ball pressure — because he can be a very, very good defender. Those easy things are what we want to see.”
Fernández said he wants to see Saraf play more aggressive defense.
