The Nets had to wait eight months to renew acquaintances with the team that ended their season last year and took their lunch money while they were at it.
One regular-season game won’t make up for how the 76ers bullied them on the way to a playoff series win last April, but the Nets did the only thing they could Sunday and got the win anyway in emphatic fashion.
Playing the second half of a back-to-back, the Nets took advantage of a Joel Embiid-less 76ers team and came away with a 109-89 victory at Barclays Center.
“You always want to beat teams that you may play in the playoffs, but it’s not so much the previous playoff series that we had [that crossed my mind],” said Spencer Dinwiddie, who led the way with 24 points and six assists.
The Nets (14-12) led by as many as 26 — their biggest lead of the season — and the 89 points they allowed were a season-low, limiting the 76ers (20-8) to 5-for-26 shooting from 3 while bringing the physicality that was missing in their playoff series.
“One of our best defensive performances since I’ve been here,” coach Kenny Atkinson said.
Spencer DinwiddieAPBut the talk of the postgame locker room was Dinwiddie’s one-handed slam in the face of Tobias Harris that got the crowd and his bench in a frenzy during a third quarter in which the Nets pulled away for good.
Atkinson replayed a clip of the dunk in front of the team after the game, much to Dinwiddie’s delight.
“I was happy to be on the good clip for once,” Dinwiddie said with a grin. “It made me feel like the Grinch when his heart expanded. ’Tis the season.”
Soon after, the Nets went on 10-0 run that put their lead in double digits for the rest of the night.
Joe Harris added 16 points while DeAndre Jordan delivered 13 points and 11 rebounds.
A night after shooting 38.6 percent — including just 26.1 percent (12-for-46) from 3 — in a 110-102 loss to the Raptors, the Nets shot 45.3 percent and controlled the play inside with Embiid (upper respiratory illness) missing. They outscored the 76ers 64-54 in the paint and out-rebounded them 52-38.
“Embiid was out, but they still have [Al] Horford, Mike Scott, Ben [Simmons], Tobias,” Joe Harris said. “Across the board, they’re very big matchups for everybody. I thought we did a good job just matching their physicality and trying to be the aggressive team the whole night.”
It was the 76ers’ physicality that reigned when they beat the Nets in a feisty five-game playoff series in the first round last season. Sunday’s matchup lacked the same kind of tension — perhaps because the two main players in the drama, Embiid and Jared Dudley, were not in the arena — but the Nets were happy to take the win on tired legs and move on.
With Embiid out, Atkinson had been concerned about the 76ers playing fast behind Simmons (20 points). The game never sped up on the Nets, though, who took a lead with 5:54 left in the first quarter and never let it go.
“Obviously Joel’s a force inside, outside, he can score on every tier of the basketball court,” Jordan said. “But they’re still a great team. They got Al and Mike who can spread the floor, so they’re a little differently when Joel’s out of the game. But we still had to come out with the same mindset as if he was playing, with the same physicality, with the same defensive mindset we came out with.”




