NEW YORK — There was no way the Nets were giving away another game.
After Spencer Dinwiddie hit the buzzer-beating shot to win it at Barclays Center on Wednesday, the Nets stared another disappointing defeat in the face, this time against the West’s 12th-seeded Portland Trail Blazers, a team lacking the majority of its main talent, including injured superstar Damian Lillard.
But Kevin Durant got the help he didn’t have against Dallas: No, not the unvaccinated Kyrie Irving, but sharpshooter Seth Curry, who returned from an ankle injury to pepper the Trail Blazers with a barrage of 3s to help lift the Nets to a 128-123 victory at The Clays on Friday.
Curry scored 27 points and hit seven 3s after missing three straight games with a persisting ankle injury. He helped power the Nets to a much-needed victory, as is the case every game as the Nets jostle for playoff position as the eighth seed in the Eastern Conference.
If the Nets are going to salvage what’s left of the regular season and make a run at the sixth seed — the last playoff seed exempt from sudden-death play-in tournament territory — they’re going to have to win out.
Or get as close as they can to a perfect record to finish their remaining games of the season.
That’s because the Cleveland Cavaliers and Toronto Raptors are now tied for the East’s sixth seed, and the Nets are three games behind both. That means the Nets need to win three more games than both the Cavs and Raptors to tie them for sixth place in the conference.
The Nets hold the tiebreaker with a 2-1 series record against the Cavaliers, but are tied, 2-2, in the season series against the Raptors. Since both the Nets and Raptors are in the same division — and neither of them lead the Atlantic — the tiebreaker would go to the team with the best in-division record.
As of Friday night, the Nets are 9-6 against Atlantic Division opponents, and the Raptors are 7-5.
This is important because there are only 12 more games in the regular season, and Irving, who is unvaccinated and ineligible to play in home games until a change in New York City’s vaccine mandate, is only available to play in three games for the rest of the regular season.
Play-in tournament rules force the seventh and eighth seeds in each conference to play a game where the winner takes the seventh seed outright. The loser of that No. 7 vs. No. 8 game plays the winner of the No. 8 vs. No. 9 game.
The loser of that game is eliminated from the playoff picture altogether. The winner secures the No. 8 seed.
Which is why the Nets need to put the pedal to the metal, and why first halves like the one against Portland are particularly unacceptable for a championship contender, even if they’re shorthanded several pieces.
The Trail Blazers, who average 107 points per game on the season, took a 75-62 lead into the half. It was one of the more embarrassing displays of effort on the Nets’ part all season. They were a team that looked disinterested in protecting the rim or accepting the challenge of individual, man-on-man defense. A lack of taking care of the ball compounded the Nets’ struggles in the first and second quarters: Brooklyn turned the ball over nine times in the opening two periods.
Durant was particularly complicit in the turnover category: He scored 38 points on 11-of-15 shooting from the field, but turned the ball over eight times under Portland’s swarming defensive pressure.
Curry, however, alleviated some of that pressure, especially in the opening minutes of the fourth quarter, a set of few minutes Durant spent watching from the sidelines. Curry, who had it going from deep all night long, scored six of the Nets’ first eight points of the period on a pair of back-to-back 3s that gave the Nets their first double-digit lead of the night.
The Trail Blazers called a timeout and never responded.
The Nets trailed by as many as 18 points but outscored the Trail Blazers, 39-26, to swing the momentum back in their favor in the third quarter. The Nets need to bottle up that second-half aggression and use it to start the remainder of their regular-season games,
The competition gets a lot stiffer than the 12th seeded Trail Blazers on the rest of this regular-season journey, and the Nets need every win they can get. A loss can be the difference between making the playoffs and a second disappointing early exit in a row.
