One play in the third quarter of the Brooklyn Nets’ Friday win over the Boston Celtics captures the destructive potential of the team’s offense.
The Celtics had rallied to cut a 21-point deficit down to just nine, and the Nets needed a second basket to put an end to Boston’s run and regain the momentum. Spencer Dinwiddie whipped the ball over to DeAndre Jordan, who fed Kevin Durant in the high post with a mismatch against the smaller Marcus Smart. On the touch, Jaylen Brown shifted off of Kyrie Irving — who was sitting in the corner spacing the floor — to help from the weak side.
But the pass didn’t go to Irving, nor did a shot come from Durant. Instead, Joe Harris beat his man off the cut and scored off a Durant dime. And if Harris really wanted, he could have hit Irving in the corner for a wide open three, since Brown was already under the basket ready to help.
The 2019-20 Brooklyn Nets offense can be best summed as overpowered, but in basketball, there is no such thing as overkill: There are only wins, losses and championships.
For the Nets it’s pick your poison, and they’re all varying degrees of lethal. Led by two of the best scorers in NBA history, Brooklyn has the capacity to have an all-time offense.
“It’s great to have so many guys that can penetrate, create for others, create for themselves. It makes us less predictable,” Durant told the Daily News. “It makes the defense have to focus on every player obviously on the floor, but your defense is good when you get to key-in on one or two guys that handle the ball all game. So when you’ve got four or five guys who play off the ball, play on the ball, I think that makes us less predictable on the offensive side.”
The unpredictability was fully on display as Nets head coach Steve Nash finally settled into the flow of his rotations. Caris LeVert is coming off the bench, but will still play healthy minutes alongside both Durant and Irving.
Here’s another one of those third-quarter plays that exemplifies the unpredictability of this Nets offense: Durant found LeVert in transition, and LeVert gave the ball to Irving at the top of the key. Irving kicked the ball right back to LeVert, who had the mismatch, and LeVert took Celtics big man Daniel Theis to the rim and scored.
“For me, I’m just aggressive, especially when I’m out there with those guys, because you can’t help off of any of them,” LeVert said. “You can’t help off of KD, you can’t help off of Ky, you can’t help off of Joe. So it’s really just me out there playing against my defender so I feel like Spencer and I will really benefit from those situations, for sure.”
Irving and Durant don’t have to create for themselves all the time, either. Irving’s third basket on the night, for that matter, was facilitated by two of his teammates: Durant and DeAndre Jordan.
Durant set an off-ball screen for Irving, and the direction of the screen suggested Irving was headed to the top of the three-point line to receive a pass. Instead, he faked toward Durant then darted baseline, where Jordan found him with a laser pass for the easy layup.
The Nets have an equal-opportunity offense where whoever has the best shot takes the best shot. That offense isn’t always generated by Irving, even if he’s the team’s de facto point guard.
“Yeah, no no. I don’t even want to put any clickbait out there, man. Literally, we are just an open offense,” Irving responded when asked if he’s playing off the ball more. “We just have an equal offense here where we believe in each other’s gifts and we want to be able to play to those gifts and those strengths and whether I bring the ball up or not, it doesn’t really phase me. I think I am excited for the next chapters in my career of not being so ball dominant and being able to play off the ball and just conserve energy to be able to be effective and more selective spots in our offense.
“So, we have multiple ball handlers, and I am not going to be the person to get in the way of that. I am literally just spacing out whenever I am needed and whenever my ball handler responsibility is up, I go do it. Other than that, it is pretty open. Fair game, man. We have great players on this team, so, you’ve got to go get it.”
The Nets depth is still in question — not its talent, but its cohesion. There are 16 players on Brooklyn’s roster who could command a legitimate role on any team, but there are only 240 minutes to go around, and the majority of those minutes will go to the core 10 or 11 players in the rotation.
But if there are no egos and no agendas, just basketball in Brooklyn, then what we’ve seen from the Nets in two preseason games could be indicative of things to come. The Nets are attempting to break basketball, one scoring barrage at a time.
And here’s one thing that’s hard to deny: They clearly have the talent to do it.
