The Brooklyn Nets closed the preseason with a 3-1 record, but their performance on defense has left coaches and players uneasy heading into Wednesday’s home opener against Charlotte.
Brooklyn’s offense carried the team through much of the preseason, but the defense swung wildly between disruptive and porous. The Nets were strong defensively in wins over Charlotte and Philadelphia, but struggled badly in a comeback win over Washington and were blown out defensively in their preseason finale loss in Miami.
“Yeah, that’ll be the most important thing. Offensively we’ll be able to score with the best of them,” forward Michael Porter Jr. said. “I think offensively is not a problem. [But] if we want to be good, then defensively we’ll have to lock in.”
Coach Jordi Fernández broke down the inconsistency bluntly.
“There’s been two games that we were an aggressive and ball-pressure defensive team where I thought we were pretty good,” Fernández said. “And then two games where we were a poor defensive team with our transition, our rim protection. We’ve got to decide who we want to be, and the things that we can control … and do it every game. Don’t rely on shot-making, on things that don’t really matter. Rely on things that are going to make you a winning team.”
The numbers back up the split personality. Brooklyn finished the preseason with the second-worst opponent field goal percentage in the league at .498 and an effective field goal percentage allowed of .588. Yet the team’s overall defensive rating wasn’t as bad as those figures suggest, largely because the Nets ranked among the top 10 teams in opponent turnovers, turnover percentage and points off turnovers.
Brooklyn forced 47 turnovers over its first two preseason games while allowing an average of just 99 points, and held Washington to 50 points in the second half of a win on Monday after forcing 15 turnovers in that stretch. But when opponents protected the ball, the Nets struggled badly. They forced only eight turnovers in the first half against Washington and gave up 72 points in that span. In Miami, they forced just 15 turnovers for the entire game and allowed 144 points on 58.5 percent shooting.
Fernández summed up the pattern this way:
“The team that we were in the first two games where we pressured the ball, we created turnovers, that’s what good defensive teams do,” Fernández said. “But in the Washington game that we allowed 70 points in the first half and 50 in the second, that was terrible. Then in the Miami game, the whole game — all the quarters 32-plus points, one of [43] — it’s just not good enough. So, if you think about it, for 10 quarters out of 16 we were good and six were really bad. So we want to stay on the [good side].”
Rim protection has also emerged as a concern after Brooklyn traded center Nic Claxton over the summer. That issue was magnified in Miami when center Day’Ron Sharpe got into foul trouble.
“[Fernández preaches] just executing our staples on defense, controlling that, controlling what needs to be controlled, and doing everything with a purpose, but doing it also hard,” Sharpe said. “So that’s the main thing he preaches. If we could do that for four quarters, we’d give ourselves a good chance to win.”
Guard Mikel Brown Jr. said the problems are more about focus than effort.
“Coach always preaches that we can play hard, but we’ve also got to play smart and attention to detail. That’s something that we’ve been inconsistent at, but we’re going to continue to work at it every single day and fix it,” Brown said. “It’s just little mistakes we could correct. Just being clean in our shifts, being early and often. It’s not that we’re just completely blowing up on coverages; it’s just about having the right mindset, staying consistent throughout the game for all 48 minutes and keep applying that same pressure, that physicality that coach is talking about. It’s just the little things when it comes to that point. We clean those things up, we’ll be fine.”
Brooklyn opens the regular season Wednesday at home against Charlotte.
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