It’s hard to tell if the Nets are championship contenders or pretenders. The truth, as coach Steve Nash likes to say, is probably somewhere in the middle.
When the Nets took the defending champion Milwaukee Bucks to overtime just to fall short by one point, they looked like undoubted contenders.
And when they sleepwalked through a disappointing 122-115 loss Saturday in Atlanta despite a career-high 55 points from Kevin Durant — a game with play-in tournament seeding implications, a must-win for all intents and purposes — the Nets looked more like a team with no business being named next to the Bucks and other teams atop the Eastern Conference.
