NEW YORK — It doesn’t matter who the Nets have to play. A win is a win, and they need to win out.
With four games left in the regular season, the Nets are fighting for their playoff lives. As of Monday, they’re tied with the Charlotte Hornets for the Eastern Conference’s 10th seed. If they finish the season ninth or 10th , they will be just one more loss from missing the playoffs altogether and will require two wins to secure the eighth and final playoff seed.
The Nets, though, aren’t worried about that play-in game. They have to play it, whether they win or lose their final four. Their opponent could vary depending on seeding — the Nets could play the Hornets, Hawks or Cavaliers.
But the goal remains the same as it was at the beginning of the season: defy the odds and win a championship, no matter who is in front of them at the end of the regular season. No matter how stacked those odds are against them.
“Who cares? Whoever we play, we play,” Kevin Durant said after team practice on Monday. “I don’t care who we play, I don’t care that we’re in the play-in. Let’s just tip the ball up, you know? See what happens. That’s all you can control. It’s too stressful thinking about, or trying to dodge a team. ... Let’s just play the game.”
Cue the excuses because there are many.
From the Nets’ botched handling of Kyrie Irving’s vaccination status (the decision not to let him play road games when he was ruled ineligible to play at home), to a disgruntled superstar who forced his way out via trade in the middle of the season — and all the injuries — the Nets haven’t been able to catch a break.
The Nets lost sharpshooter Joe Harris for the season on Nov. 14, then a month later Durant went down with an MCL sprain. Ben Simmons developed a herniated disk while ramping up to make his Nets debut and has been sidelined since his arrival on Feb. 10.
“You guys do the math, but it’s probably somewhere around six games that we’ve played with our group (healthy), not including Ben and Joe,” head coach Steve Nash said after Monday’s practice. “That’s just our reality. We have to embrace it.”
The Nets lost 11 straight and strung together a 5-16 record after Durant got hurt. They went from No. 1 in the East with a 27-15 record to 32-31 when he returned from injury. They enter Tuesday’s matchup against the Houston Rockets just 40-38.
“To be honest, I feel like our season was derailed by my injury,” Durant said. “I’m not looking at it like we’re just not a good basketball team. There wasn’t a lot of continuity with me and Kyrie out of the lineup. That’s just what it is. When we’re all on the floor together, I like what we’ve got.”
The Nets still believe. They point to the game against the Bucks — a one-point overtime loss to the defending champions — as a positive. They believe they defended well against the Hawks without Seth Curry (ankle), Goran Dragic (health and safety protocols) and Bruce Brown (flu), but bailed them out with careless fouling.
“In the grand scheme of the game, the totality of it, I don’t think we were that bad,” Durant said of the loss to the Hawks. “We’re actually stopping when the ball is live. The game is weird. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out in your favor even though you play well.”
If the Nets won that game, they’d have the eighth seed outright and would need just one win in the play-in tournament to advance to the playoffs.
This, however, is the Nets’ new reality. They started the season as undoubted championship favorites, but now it’s unclear if they’ll have a season beyond next Tuesday. The Nets have played well at times but unraveled down the stretch. They let the Bucks score seven unanswered points to force overtime in their loss, then trailed just one point against the Hawks with under three minutes to go in the fourth before Atlanta went on a 15-8 run to close the game.
“We still did some good things. It’s just a matter of, if we don’t foul against Milwaukee that last play, then we’re talking about that game differently and that’s one possession” Durant said. “So, wins and losses matter to people, and it looks different, but from the inside, we’re actually doing some solid stuff, but we can’t lose games. We can’t make too many mistakes and lose ourselves like that by fouling or turning the ball over.”
Durant feels the Nets grew from those games, but at this point in the season, growth may not help the team more than marks in the win column. The Nets need to go four-of-four in their final stretch against the Rockets, Knicks, Cavs and Pacers. And they need to do so even if their own recent history says they might not.
“We can’t feel bad about ourselves,” Bruce Brown said. “We’ve got our backs against the wall right now. We need to win out, and I think we can do that for sure.”
