Brooklyn Nets | Pace and Space

The Broken Nets Are Back in 2023

November 5, 2022 - by Fox Doucette

The Broken Nets…er, Brooklyn Nets…are well on their way to barfing out another Dumpster fire of a season. At 3-6, no matter what that 128-86 demolition of the Washington Wizards may try and tell you, they’re cooked. Kyrie Irving is suspended indefinitely for graduating from Idiot School summa cum laude. Ben Simmons continues to fear 3-pointers the way small children fear monsters under the bed. And while Kevin Durant is off to a fantastic start (32.0 ppg, .522 FG%, .196 WS/48), you know he’s going to get hurt again. It’s just a question of when and what body part. The …

Analysis

The Brooklyn Nets’ Worst Season: 2010

September 21, 2022 - by Fox Doucette - 1 Comment

Since Brooklyn and East Rutherford, New Jersey are both part of the New York metropolitan area (or, in Brooklyn’s case, New York City itself), one cannot consider the franchise’s move in 2012 into the Barclays Center to constitute an entirely new Brooklyn Nets franchise. Which is a fortunate quirk of geography, because in 2009-10, the Nets barfed out not only the worst season in the history of the franchise, they put together one of the most utterly putrid seasons in the entire history of the NBA. Twice in NBA history, teams have won 70 games; six times, teams have lost …

Editorial

Brooklyn Nets…Or Broken Nets?

November 17, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

The Brooklyn Nets are 10-5 so far through games of November 16, having been clobbered 117-99 on their home floor by the Golden State Warriors Tuesday night. Their five losses have been against Milwaukee, Charlotte, Miami, Chicago, and the aforementioned Warriors, and the closest of those losses was by 13 points. That’s your defending NBA champions and three teams regarded as contenders, along with the ultimate wildcard of a Hornets team. And while Brooklyn is still third in the East and just a game behind surprising Washington for the top record in the conference, questions surround the Nets and whether …

Analysis

The Brooklyn Nets’ Best Season: 2002

September 22, 2021 - by Fox Doucette - 2 Comments.

You’ve probably already objected to the headline. “Fox, you idiot, the Brooklyn Nets didn’t exist in 2002, they were the New Jersey Nets, didn’t you say you weren’t counting franchises that moved?” Ahem. About that. Moving a team that had been exiled to the swamp after the ABA merger because the Knicks threw a hissy fit about having a better team in their same market back to New York City proper to be the better team in their same market doesn’t count as changing cities. Sorry, East Rutherford, but this isn’t hockey. The Knicks are competing with one franchise that’s …

Editorial

2021 Playoffs: The Terrible Coach Redemption Tour

June 21, 2021June 26, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

Editor’s Note: I made the mistake of assuming Brooklyn would win Game 7 of the East semis and wrote this column accordingly. Of course, Milwaukee won that game, so Mike Budenholzer, not Steve Nash, is coaching against McMillan and the Hawks in the ECF. Pace and Space regrets the error. The NBA was, for decades, a coaches’ league. Great leaders like Gregg Popovich, Phil Jackson, and Pat Riley became synonymous with the teams they led to greatness and were linked to the careers of their star players in Tim Duncan, Michael Jordan (and later Kobe Bryant), and Magic Johnson. In …

Analysis

The 2021 Brooklyn Nets: Overrated or Underrated?

March 13, 2021March 13, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

The Brooklyn Nets were supposed to self-destruct. With Kevin Durant‘s questionable health following a ruptured Achilles, an injury that has effectively claimed the career of all players 30 and older to suffer it before him, the Nets were supposed to have a reliability problem that would drag them down the way Durant missing all of the 2020 season dragged them down in the bubble. With Kyrie Irving and James Harden two of the biggest head cases in the league, they were supposed to be at each other’s throats in as much time as it took coach Steve Nash to try …

Editorial

The James Harden Trade Or: COVID-19, Brooklyn Nets 0

January 14, 2021 - by Fox Doucette

Man, what a time for the power to go out. Yesterday, while your intrepid columnist was sitting in the dark waiting for Puget Sound Energy to get to me among the 400,000 other customers who lost power in the Seattle area thanks to a huge windstorm that blew through—tip your waitress, I’m here all week—Tuesday night, the Brooklyn Nets, Houston Rockets, Indiana Pacers, and Cleveland Cavaliers worked out a bombshell of a four-team trade that (functionally) sent James Harden to Brooklyn, Victor Oladipo to Houston, Caris LeVert to Indiana, and Jarrett Allen to Cleveland. Sure, there were some other players …

Editorial

Should the NBA Learn About Coaching from the NFL?

December 6, 2020 - by Fox Doucette

When the Brooklyn Nets hired Steve Nash, there were questions about what kind of system Nash would bring in to make the best use of Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant, and the rest of the talent on that team as they worked their way back from a disappointing 2020 campaign riddled with injury. The Nets then brought in Mike D’Antoni after MDA’s departure from the Houston Rockets, and Nash immediately declared that D’Antoni would be the architect of Brooklyn’s offense. Then Nash went a step further, describing lead assistant Jacque Vaughn explicitly as his “defensive coordinator.” If this sounds familiar, it …

Analysis

Sunday Statistical Test: Should Hack-A-Shaq Come Back?

September 6, 2020 - by Fox Doucette

The old “Hack-A-Shaq” strategy of fouling a poor free throw shooter to send him to the line whereupon he’d then miss at least one free throw and have to be removed from the game as an offensive liability never made much sense statistically. Unless the player was truly horrid from the line (even Shaq, a career 52.7 percent free throw shooter, would thus generate 105.4 points per 100 possessions before a single one of his free throws went for an offensive rebound and got the Magic, Lakers, or whoever an extended possession and often a putback), the strategy inevitably generated …

Analysis

Will Steve Nash Reinvent Former-Player Coaches?

September 3, 2020 - by Fox Doucette

Former NBA players, if they were any good at all during their careers, tend to make terrible NBA coaches. When you look at guys like Byron Scott, Lionel Hollins, and Nate McMillan, you see guys whose understanding of basketball strategy is rooted in the time when they played the game and tends to lag behind more innovative coaches who come from the college ranks or from the ranks of guys who may have played but never played particularly well (look up Pat Riley or Mike D’Antoni on Basketball Reference for an example of the latter.) Which is what makes the …