The Great Brooklyn Nets Front Court Experiment of 2013 has ended more or less where it started.
For months, I have watched my taller colleague chronicle the tinkering of Nets coach P.J. Carlesimo with Brooklyn’s big guys. First, Peej told professional handsome dude Kris Humphries to take a seat and give three-happy Mirza Teletovic a chance to spice up the offense with his outside shooting.
When that didn’t pay dividends, Carlesimo said he would explore putting Andray Blatche and Brook Lopez — Brooklyn’s tallest and most efficient scorers — on the floor at the same time. Yet, by this week, the pair had only shared the hardwood for 89 minutes.
So now, with four games left in the season and the playoffs looming, it appears the coaching staff has determined the Nets’ bigs are who they thought they were.
Here’s a backcourt scribe’s three playoff wishes for Brooklyn’s front court:
Reggie Evans continues to play like a man possessed by the spirit of Dennis Rodman: Whether a basketball player can be possessed by the spirit of a person who is still alive is debatable, but it’s tough to prove the Worm’s recent North Korea excursion wasn’t part of an extended “Weekend At Bernie’s” scenario. Evans has led the league in rebounds in March and April, and has tapped into a semblance of offensive game that has eluded him for much of his pro career. For all those boards, though, the scrapper still doesn’t do much to protect the paint defensively, recording only four blocks in 421 minutes in March.
Andray Blatche takes care of the rock: After seven seasons marked by boneheadedness on and off the court, Blatche has assembled a comeback worthy of a Hollywood script — assuming you wrote around that time back in January when a woman was allegedly sexually assaulted by a fellow partier in the ballplayer’s Philadelphia hotel suite at 3:30 am the night before a game. On the court, Blatche is shooting just shy of 52 percent from the field and ranks 13th in the entire league in player efficiency. But recently he has been bitten by an old habit: turnovers. In the first four months of the season, Blatche averaged one turnover for every 14 minutes of court time. In March and April, he has given the ball away once every 8.5 minutes. The Nets can’t afford to have Blatche squander precious playoff possessions.
Kris Humphries’s divorce trial is pushed back: Only in New York, right? Humphries’s courtroom battle with ex Kim Kardashian actually kicks off in an L.A. courtroom on May 6, per Us Weekly, which would affix a sideshow to any Nets playoff run. It’s not that Humphries’s bench production is a deal-breaker for Brooklyn at this point, but the squad could do without the extra distraction.
Matt Spolar is a nearly 6-foot-1 journalist with a middling high school basketball career who is sure the Nets win thanks to team’s top-tier guards.
