NEW YORK — For three quarters, the Nets gave the fans what they wanted.
A victory for a championship contender is supposed to feel dominant. It’s supposed to feel effortless. It’s supposed to remove any shadow of a doubt as to which of the two competing teams is better.
A victory for a championship contender should almost feel unopposed.
And for three quarters, the Nets looked like an unopposed title fighter, punching down on much lesser competition in an eventual 115-108 win over Cleveland to clinch the Eastern Conference’s No. 7 seed. They ripped the Cavaliers to shreds early and then allowed Tuesday’s play-in game to turn into a familiar game of hot potato.
First it was Kyrie Irving’s turn to eat, then it was Kevin Durant’s, then Andre Drummond or Bruce Brown.
And then the wheels fell off midway through the third quarter. The Nets built a 22-point lead, then watched the Cavaliers chop into that lead.
Twenty. Seventeen. Fourteen. Twelve. The Cavaliers cut the Nets’ lead all the way down to six with five minutes to go in the fourth quarter.
But the Nets have been here before. In fact, they’ve been here more times than Durant would prefer.
Blown leads are almost intertwined into the fabric of the Nets’ DNA. They build leads, take their feet off the gas, then ramp it up — no pun intended — when the game gets too close.
It happened when they blew an 18-point lead against the Indiana Pacers, when they blew a 17-point lead against the Houston Rockets, when the league-worst Pistons turned a 10-point Nets lead into a 12-point advantage of their own, and it happened in last week’s matchup against the Cavaliers.
The Nets led by 17 at the end of the first quarter and found themselves in a tie game in the fourth quarter before pulling away to win by 11.
The only thing different on Tuesday night were the stakes.
A loss on Tuesday would have been devastating. It would have sent the Nets from a solidified matchup against the second-seeded Boston Celtics into a win-or-go-home consolation showdown against the winner of the No. 9-10 game between the Charlotte Hornets and Atlanta Hawks.
A loss, however, would have been par from the course. This is who the Nets are. They might play with their food, and it might not always be pretty, but they handle business when it matters most.
That’s because they’re led by two players who’ve won it all before, and a cool, calm and collected head coach in Steve Nash, who might not be the best tactician among his peers, but continues to keep this team striving for incremental improvement on a nightly basis.
Irving made each of his first 11 shots and finished with 34 points on 12-of-15 shooting to go with 10 assists. Durant shot 9 of 16 from the field for 25 points and 11 assists. The duo became the first pair of Nets teammates to record 20-plus points and 10-plus assists since Derrick Coleman and Rumeal Robinson back in 1993.
And they continue to keep this team on the right path, even when the going gets tough, even in the face of adversity, even when another team’s run looks like it might swing the momentum out of their favor.
More importantly, the victory reaffirms the belief that this Nets team can turn on the jets when they need to, that they can flip the switch from a team ostensibly cruising through the regular season to one ready to power through the post-season and potentially upset a higher-seeded opponent.
The Nets can’t afford many missteps against the Celtics. Boston is home to the league’s best defense. It’s home to Jayson Tatum, an outright star who hung 54 points on the Nets the last time these teams met. It’s home to Marcus Smart, a frontrunner for Defensive Player of the Year. And it’s home to Ime Udoka, one of Nash’s former assistants who has become a Coach of the Year candidate by turning the Celtics into an Eastern Conference juggernaut.
But the Nets have something most other teams don’t. They have Durant and Irving, two shoo-in Hall of Famers who double as two of the best scorers in NBA history. And they have experience with their backs against the wall, because in a way, they’ve been playing urgent, desperate basketball for the past two months.
