Team was lead by someone other than their Big 3
BROOKLYN – It took the help of the enemy so to speak to help the Brooklyn Nets gain a playoff berth. The Memphis Grizzlies made the effort to try and win the game against the Indiana Pacers, which made what the Nets did earlier by beating the Orlando Magic 101-88 relevant.
The Nets put themselves in the precarious position by laying eggs against the Milwaukee Bucks and Chicago Bulls in getting beat by more than 20 points in each of the prior two games.
Small forward Bojan Bogdanovic led the Nets in scoring with a career high 28 points on 12-17 shooting that including 3-8 from 3-point land. Bojan seems to shoot his lights out jumper with minimal effort and plays with great efficiency. He’s also a quiet sort to which he almost went unnoticed by even his own head coach. “I [almost] forgot about Bogie,” Nets coach Lionel Hollins said of Bojan, “Bogie was Bogie bad. He was good. I could tell early that he had it going on. We kept trying to come back to him, get him some stuff.”That stuff that Coach Hollins was referring to was getting him plays so that he was lethal from everywhere he shot the ball.
Bojan even had fans on his own team. “He’s been pretty consistent for the past couple of weeks,” Thaddeus Young said. “He’s been playing out of his mind. He’s what, 22 [years old], stuff like that. About five or six threes; I mean he’s been great.”
When the game ended, the Nets and their fans had to sweat out the aforementioned Grizzlies verses Pacers tussle. “We’re just going about it as if we’re going to be in the playoffs already,” Young said. “We’re preparing and trying to get ourselves mentally focused.”
The Nets are indeed in the playoffs as an eighth seed in the Eastern Conference thanks to the Grizzlies besting the Pacers, 95-83. They will be matched up against the number one seeded, Atlanta Hawks to whom they’ve not had much success against this season. “Last time we played them pretty good,” Young said, “We went down to the wire. If we could play them the way we played them last time, just moving the ball, giving them a taste of their own medicine, when we’re just moving, driving, kicking, and we’re just executing and I think we’ll be fine in the series.”
The Nets were able to salvage what could have been a dreadful regular season; now the question remains, how long with this new season last?
Jerald L. Hoover
Jerald@puresportsny.com