Whether or not players enjoy the play-in tournament, now in Year 2, the Nets finished the regular season in seventh. That means they are not a lock for the postseason just yet.
Instead, they will have to defend their playoff positioning in a showdown against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Tuesday.
“I think somebody’s in the back room, hip-hip-hooraying, whoever created the tournament,” Nets star Kyrie Irving said after Sunday’s regular-season finale against the Pacers. “I guess somebody’s in the back room saying that this works, but as a competitor, it feels like one of those Game 6s, Game 5s, Game 7s where it’s a must-win.”
The winner will take the seventh seed for a date with the Celtics in the first round. The loser will have to play the winner of the nine-ten game, with the winner of that securing the eighth seed and the loser securing a trip to Cancun.
If it’s giving Game 7 vibes, that’s because it feels like one. The Nets, in theory, can afford to lose a game before facing elimination, but losing on Tuesday is not the plan for a team with its sights set on a championship.
“Absolutely,” Steve Nash said Monday when asked if it felt like a Game 7.“We’re only focusing on tomorrow. If we happen to lose and have to play a subsequent game, we’ll focus on that game. But right now we’ll play this like it’s our opportunity to get in and give the requisite focus and energy.”
The Nets must first handle the task at hand: a young and fun Cavaliers team with an All-Star guard in Darius Garland and two ghosts from Brooklyn’s past in Jarrett Allen and Caris LeVert.
Allen’s availability for Tuesday has yet to be determined. He fractured his left ring finger on March 6 and has not played since, but went through a heavy pregame warmup with tape on his left finger while the Cavaliers were in Brooklyn for their matchup last Friday. LeVert is still seeking to find his rhythm on the Cavaliers after a midseason trade from the Indiana Pacers, but he is still a talented scorer and playmaker who posted 16 points and four assists against the Nets in their last matchup.
Garland, however, is the head of the Cavs’ snake. He is a first-time All-Star, a candidate for the league’s Most Improved Player, and one of the more crafty point guards in all of basketball, averaging just under 22 points and nine assists per game.
“He’s cold,” said backup center Nic Claxton, calling guarding him a “team effort.”
“All five guys, we’ve gotta be locked in.”
The Nets, though, are not the Cavs. Where the Cavs have Garland, Allen and LeVert, the Nets raise them an Irving, a Durant, and possibly a Ben Simmons, the 25-year-old All-Star point forward who has yet to make his Nets debut since arriving in Brooklyn but has increased his workload and is striving to play his first game in either the first or second round of the playoffs.
Simmons is not going to be available Tuesday, but the Nets have been a difficult team to defend with their five active starters of Durant, Irving, Seth Curry, Bruce Brown and Andre Drummond. Curry and Drummond are relatively new, arriving with Simmons as part of the Harden deal. Drummond once categorized this upcoming playoff push as similar to “playing pickup,” in that the players are relatively unfamiliar with each other, so they’re learning each other’s game on the fly.
“We’re all excited. We’re still getting to know this group,” Nash said on Monday. “There’s confidence in there, but there’s excitement to continue to grow and build and compete. We don’t really know a ton about our group relatively to the other teams who have been together for longer periods of time or had longer continuity this season. ... We should be excited about what we could build, what we can accomplish in a short period of time here and how difficult we could be to beat in a playoff situation.”
As much of a challenge as the Nets pose on paper, they have shown a propensity to play beneath the championship standard, especially against lesser opponents, which the Cavs, as good as they are, qualify as. For example, the Nets surrendered a 18-point lead to the Pacers in the season finale. They let the Knicks run up a 21-point lead before coming back to win in the second half, and in last Friday’s matchup against the Cavaliers, they blew a 17-point lead before opening the game back up in the fourth quarter.
“It’s risky,” Durant said after the Nets came back to beat the Knicks at Madison Square Garden last week. “I hate being down. I hate even being that team. Get down and fight back. Like I don’t like that s---. I don’t want that to be a part of who we are.”
History, however, should be on the Nets’ side. They have won the season series against the Cavs, 3-1, have the better and more experienced roster on paper and have their sights set on far more than just a playoff appearance.
