The Nets are still a resilient basketball team under head coach Jacque Vaughn, and Mikal Bridges’ mid-range jump shot does not decline.
Those two factors — along with an overdose of zeal displayed by a Celtics team up big early — are how the Nets turned a 28-point first-half deficit on the road in Boston into an unlikely 115-105 victory against over the No. 2 seed in the Eastern conference Friday night.
It matched the largest comeback in Nets history and the largest comeback of any NBA team this season.
“We just kept fighting, man. We just kept fighting. We got stops, and that was the biggest thing,” Bridges said in his walk-off postgame interview. “We ain’t gonna stop fighting no matter what the score is. We were down big, but we’re just gonna fight.”
It was a win that snapped a four-game losing streak, which included several blowout losses during the stretch.
Vaughn has said it twice since the trades that sent Kevin Durant to the Phoenix Suns and Kyrie Irving to the Dallas Mavericks.
The Nets have to be the hardest-playing team in the NBA if they’re going to survive the second half of the season.
For reference: Brooklyn exited the NBA All-Star break with the seventh-strongest remaining schedule in all of basketball.
And after the Nets lost by 44 in Chicago and by 24 to the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, there was ample evidence available to point to the Nets losing big to a legitimate championship contender in Boston to a Celtics team fresh off an NBA Finals appearance.
In fact, after the Nets came back from down 18 to lose on a Trae Young buzzer-beater in Atlanta, the reality of losing a tight game down the stretch loomed large Friday night.
The reality, however, set in for a Nets team that just might have found its identity in Beantown.
If they play hard — and if Bridges is as special as his recent scoring scourge might suggest — the Nets have a chance to win any game.
Bridges is not Durant — even though No. 35 was his favorite player growing up.
The way he has been knocking down mid-range jumpers since his arrival in Brooklyn, however, there may be a case the two are long-lost cousins.
Bridges scored 38 points and powered Brooklyn’s offense while its defense sputtered in the opening minutes. He shot 13 of 22 from the field and four-of-six from downtown but scored 12 of his 37 points specifically on pull-up mid-range and foot-in-the-paint jump shots.
It marked the second highest-scoring game of his career after setting a new career-high with 45 points in a victory over the Miami Heat entering the All-Star break.
Bridges got some help that didn’t come until the second quarter. The Nets trailed 37-15 at the end of the first period and gave up an uninspiring bucket to Celtics star Jayson Tatum, who stole the ball a foot ahead of the closest Nets defender and beat all of Brooklyn in a foot race to the basket.
The Nets responded by outscoring the Celtics, 40-27, in the second quarter. Brooklyn held Boston to just 41 points in the second half.
And they did it thanks to some timely shooting from Cam Johnson and Dorian Finney-Smith, two newfound starters who arrived in the Durant and Irving trades.
The two went scoreless in the first quarter and combined to finish with 35 points through the rest of the game.
The Nets now have an opportunity to bottle their newfound momentum into a winnable game against a Charlotte Hornets team without star point guard LaMelo Ball (ankle) for the remainder of their season.
If Friday night was any indication of the kind of team the Nets can be if they fulfill Vaughn’s demand and play harder than any opponent, retaining their standing as a playoff team may still be on the table — even if the stars have aligned elsewhere this season.
