Howard Brown impressed the Nets’ coaching staff last year in summer league and then in training camp. But Brown got caught up in the numbers crunch and was among the last players cut. So he took his act to the CBA.

Where he was just about one of the first players cut.

Huh? Almost good enough for the NBA, not good enough for the CBA? And then to add just a little bit of lemon juice and salt to the paper cuts, he went nowhere in the IBL.

“Sometimes,” said Nets coach Byron Scott, “you get in a situation where if you’re not a selfish player, it’s hard to play down there because everybody is going for their own and they’re trying to make an impression. Guys like him get lost in the shuffle.”

Yeah, what a dunce. Here’s a guy not forcing shots and making passes and – gasp! – trying to defend. Get him outta here. And as weird as it might sound, it was even harder for Brown, a 6-5 shooting guard out of Villanova, to accept.

“I didn’t get a chance to show what I could do. The most I played in a game was eight minutes,” Brown said of his CBA experience with Grand Rapids. “I was up there in Michigan for like three, four games so I really didn’t get a shot. I find that real strange. It was frustrating. After the CBA, I was home for a month trying to get a job. I wound up in the IBL and didn’t get a chance there either so I’m real hungry here.”

Now there’s no guarantee for Brown, but the Nets, who presently have just one rostered two guard, Lucious Harris, with free agents waiting in the wings, wanted to take another look at Brown.

“He’s trying to make the right plays. He shoots when he has a shot, passes when he doesn’t,” said Scott. “When you’ve got guys like that, sometimes they’re put in a situation where they can’t be successful.”

Like the CBA where most simply want to catch the eye of someone in the NBA, Brown, who was Villanova’s team MVP as a junior, has a captive audience in the Nets’ coaches, who liked what they saw last year and passed their reports to Scott who assessed Brown as “a solid player” who “plays on both ends, is not selfish, can shoot the ball, take it to the basket.”

“I feel like I was real close last year and feel this is an opportunity. I just felt the places I went (CBA and IBL), they looked at me as a rookie straight out of college who had to learn the game and they didn’t really give me a chance to show what I can do, especially in game situations,” Brown said.

“I learned a lot (with the Nets), like how to read screens and play physical but mainly to play relaxed,” Brown said. “They say they want to run more so I’m trying to show I’m an up-tempo player who can run and play good pressure defense full court. I look at it as a real good opportunity. The stuff that happened last year, having a good (summer) camp and pre-season is motivation for me. It’s another chance to make it.”