AUBURN HILLS – The folks in the courtside seats started in with him early, battering Kenyon Martin with their teasing and their taunting. You might think that for all the money these fans spend to get such a splendid view of the proceedings, they might occasionally cheer for the home team. You would be mistaken.
It’s a lot more fun getting on the visitors.
Especially when the visitors are as hapless, as hopeless, as utterly clueless as the Nets were last night, all along their miserable 78-56 loss to the Pistons in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals.
The people at The Palace were all over Jason Kidd. They were all over Richard Jefferson. They mocked Kerry Kittles, and they ridiculed Jason Collins, and they made fun of Lucious Harris.
But they reserved their very best for Martin, the man who gives the Nets their swagger, the one who, in good times, emanates every bit of attitude the Nets have accrued over the past two years. And in bad times – very bad times in this case – can seem to embody every agony they endure.
“Kenyon!” they screamed. “Where are you?”
It was a fair question. Hours earlier, Martin had seemed so serene, so sanguine, so eager for his impending match-up with Rasheed Wallace.
“People keep wondering when me and Rasheed are gonna get into it,” Martin had said. “I don’t know why, to be honest. I’ve never had a problem with him and I don’t think he’s ever had one with me. I mean, we’re both good players who want the same things, that’s all.”
Martin is a good player, often a great one, who on this night was an overmatched player surrounded by overmatched players. The Pistons were a terrific defensive team this year. But last night, they bore the look of an all-time great defense. They were Doomsday. They were the Iron Curtain. They were the Fearsome Fivesome.
And they made the Nets look like a junior varsity team.
Starting with their power forward.
“I feel good,” Martin had said earlier in the day. “I’m glad we had the time off, it allowed all of us to get healthy and back into pretty good shape. As you know, we’re the underdogs in this series, so we’ll be able to approach that from a different perspective, everyone calling us underdogs and all, we’ll see. Nobody’s talking too much right now; who knows, maybe I’ll want to talk some tomorrow.”
Don’t count on that, not anymore. Not after walking off the floor with one of the quietest 11-point, five-rebound efforts you’ll ever see. It wasn’t that Martin was alone in his futility; there wasn’t enough room in the photo for all the Nets who were outclassed last night. And it wasn’t the worst playoff effort of his career; anyone who got an eyeful of the way he played in Games 5 and 6 of last year’s Finals had already seen those.
It just stood out because Martin is this team’s emotional leader, its physical core, the one player you would have thought would never be able to disappear in the face of Detroit’s all-out defensive assault.
Or so you would have thought.
The Pistons quickly asserted that they would not treat the Nets with nearly as much respect as they did last year. The Pistons spent most of the second half of the regular season looking like a basketball version of the Devils.
And that’s exactly what they looked like across the first half of this game, too. The Nets did jump out to a quick lead, looked quite unfazed by the prospect of trying to figure the Pistons out, and in fact it was the Pistons who looked a little rusty early in the game.
It didn’t stay that way for long.
