With baseball’s playoffs about to begin, the football season underway, hockey and basketball season can’t be far behind.
Both the Brooklyn Nets and New York Knicks will officially begin working out their teams Monday at their camps here in the New York City area, preparing for the upcoming 2018-19 season.
Neither team has been lighting up the Win column the past few years, but to Brooklyn’s credit, their headlines have been basketball issues. They’ve been devoid of hysterics and drama, although cheering on a 12th place team on the come up, 28-and-54 last year, can create some wildly emotional feelings. Fans of the Philadelphia 76ers repeated the phrase “trust the process” for years to maintain their sanity.
If eight more wins mean anything, Brooklyn improved last year from the 20 wins and 62 losses from the season before.
“We have to take another step forward,” said Kenny Atkinson, the Nets head coach now in his third season. “Take another big step. That’s the goal.”
Maybe “taking another step forward” is the new phrase that will catch on here with Brooklyn, like Philly’s process.
Atkinson and General Manager Sean Marks addressed preseason questions about their team and their progress in the offseason earlier this week at HSS, the Nets’ state of the art training facility in Brooklyn. They both emphasized taking another step forward from last season and areas in which they’d like to see improvement.
“I think defense is an area where we’ve kind of stayed at the same level rankings wise,” noted Atkinson about his team’s lack of growth defensively over the first two seasons. “I would really like to take a jump and improve that area. I think we were 30th in the league in creating turnovers. I think that’s an area where upping our activity is a big area for us to improve.”
But Atkinson explains that it’ll be incremental progress.
“It’s individual improvement, continuing to see guys get better. It’s team improvement. I mentioned the defensive end, but obviously to be a good team in this league, you gotta have balance.” That’s been lacking.
Atkinson continued, “We’re looking to move up the rankings in our defensive efficiency, our offensive efficiency and again, see that individual improvement from our players. I think that collective improvement, each guy getting better, we’re going to take a step forward. And the results will kinda speak for themselves.”