It wasn’t perfect. Or even pretty.
But it was enough to snap the longest losing skid in the league. Barely.
Brooklyn threw away a 20-point fourth-quarter cushion, and needed a last-ditch basket by Michael Porter Jr. to pull out a 112-109 escape against Chicago before a sellout crowd of 17,548 at Barclays Center on Friday night.
Porter had a game-high 26 points, including a go-ahead layup with five seconds left. Then the Nets needed a late steal by rookie Drake Powell on Tre Jones to close out what should have been an easy win, having turned a laugher into a nail-biter.
“The lesson is that there’s no safe lead in the NBA. Teams will always punch back,” coach Jordi Fernández said. “And obviously, give them credit. But at the end of the day, responding is important because when things go against you and then the other team takes the lead, it may seem like a big mountain in front of you. And the guys kept composure, scored when we needed to. Mike with a big bucket and then the stop.”
The Nets had led 92-72 in the fourth quarter, and 108-102 with 1:20 to play before coughing up the next seven straight points to fall behind. But they got the huge bucket from Porter on one end, and the stop from Powell on the other.
“This is how a losing team becomes a winning team,” Porter said in an on-court postgame TV interview.
The Nets improved to 12-27 behind Porter and Noah Clowney, who added 23 points and 11 rebounds.
The Bulls fell to 19-22.
It was a pivotal night in this season-long tank-a-thon, with the four teams ahead of Brooklyn in the lottery standings all facing each other.
The league-worst Pacers (10-32) defeated the runner-up Pelicans (10-34), who beat the Nets two nights earlier. And Sacramento (11-30) hosted Washington (10-29) later on Friday night. That left the Nets two games behind both the Wizards and Kings, pending that clash.
From Dec. 1-27, the Nets went 7-3 behind a 103.5 Defensive Rating that was the best in the league. Their Net Rating (10.3) was third best, and defensive rebound percentage (73.3) was fourth best. But that defense had cratered since, the Nets entering Friday having dropped five in a row and eight of their last nine.
That league-best Defensive Rating plummeted to 26th — or fifth worst — over that span. Their Net Rating was fourth worst in the league (minus-9.0) during this skid, and their defensive rebounding percentage was dead last in the entire NBA (64.0).
That’s what made the way they won this one so huge.
“We had to just stick with it,” Nic Claxton said. “Really, we shouldn’t have been that close down the stretch. We got to be better, but at the end of the day, we got the win, that’s what matters. We’re gonna watch some film tomorrow, get better, and learn from some of the mistakes that we made and some of the slips we had down the stretch.”
Brooklyn seized control of the game with a 19-2 second-quarter run, and fittingly did it on the defensive end of the floor.
Clinging to a tenuous 38-36 edge after Ayo Dosunmu’s layup with 6:29 left in the half, the Nets tightened the screws. They harassed the Bulls into missing a dozen of their next 13 shots, including all six from behind the arc.
By the time Egor Dëmin capped their run on a free throw with 40.7 seconds remaining in the half, the Nets had padded the cushion to 57-38.
It reached 20 in the fourth quarter, when rookie Nolan Traore (team-high seven assists) found Cam Thomas for a 3-pointer that made it 92-72 with 11:20 to play.
Some lackadaisical play saw Brooklyn concede a 22-6 run. When Dosunmu blew by the entire team for a dunk, the lead was down to six. And when Claxton (game-high 14 rebounds) threw the ball away to Jones, Dosunmu’s bucket cut it to 98-94 with 4:59 left.
Chicago’s Nikola Vucevic (19 points, six rebounds, five assists) bounced in a 3-pointer to cut the lead to 102-100. But Porter hit a huge left-wing 3-pointer to stem the tide.
Then Clowney hit another with 1:24 remaining to make it 108-102.
The Nets coughed up the next seven points, Traore turning the ball over to Ike Okoro for a breakaway dunk to make it 108-107. After Powell’s shot was blocked by Vucevic, Jones scored a go-ahead breakaway with 11 seconds left.
But that’s when Porter worked his way inside for a driving layup, and 110-109 lead with five seconds remaining in regulation. And Powell’s steal ensured there would be no overtime.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
