The Brooklyn Nets have essentially played themselves out of the NBA’s Eastern Conference play-in tournament hunt as they enter tonight’s match up with the Milwaukee Bucks on the road on a four-game losing streak. Despite relieving Jacque Vaughn of his head coaching duties on Feb. 19, the team still faces similar deficiencies on both ends of the floor, which reveals that the issues affecting the team are not coaching, but a roster not constructed to compete at a playoff level.
The Nets have lost 10 of their 15 games under interim head coach Kevin Ollie, the most recent being a defeat on Tuesday night at the Barclays Center to the playoff-bound New Orleans Pelicans. And the schedule isn’t in their favor. The Nets are in a stretch of playing 10 of 11 games on the road.
They began with a 118-112 loss to the Detroit Pistons on March 7 and after the Bucks tonight, will face the Knicks at Madison Square Garden on Saturday and the Raptors in Toronto on Monday before ending the span next Wednesday in Washington against the Wizards. Still, Ollie is motivated by small signs of life such as the Nets’ final 24 minutes against the Pelicans in which they outscored their opponent 46-40.
“Yes, I’m going to take the positive out of it, [the] second half, and you hold a team to 104 points…you should win,” Ollie said after the Nets’ 104-91 loss, which dropped them to 26-43 and a No. 11 seed in the East, 4 1/2 games behind the No. 10 seed 30-38 Atlanta Hawks for the final play-in spot with 13 games left.
“We just got to be better. We got to do simple, better. And that’s it. I thought we had a good second half. I’m not going to just throw that under. That’s a good team. So let’s take that effort and have that effort in the first two quarters and not get down by 20. I think we’ll be in good shape.”
Nets guard Cam Thomas had a similar take. “We can try, but we just have to keep executing and just keep trying to put it all together to stack these wins,” he said. “We can definitely look at stuff we did in the second half and show that this is the team we need to be for these last 13 games.”
Thomas, who’s averaging 21.5 points per game, has led the team in points in six straight contests.
Day’Ron Sharpe, the Nets’ 6-foot-9-inch reserve center, grabbed a career-high 17 rebounds in the loss to the Pelicans.
“He’s going in there, he’s battling, he’s been doing that even in the San Antonio game,” Ollie said of Sharpe. “He is just doing everything right and doing all the things that we asked him to do. So great game by him.”
