BOXSCORE / P. 80Nets104Hornets93There was hustle, lots and lots of it like when Nets dove on the floor or contested shots or simply got after it. There was plenty of offense, such as three 20-point Nets scorers. There was little kid enthusiasm, like when the Nets were all jumping and hugging after a buzzer-beating half-court shot at the end of the first quarter.

And down the stretch, when the game was still very much in the balance, there were all those things. And there was defense. Above all, there was defense.

The Nets held the powerful but distracted Hornets to 12 fourth-quarter points, capping the game with an impressive-at-both-ends 14-2 run that contained six of Keith Van Horn’s 29 points and provided a 104-93 victory last night at the Meadowlands.

“The offense was going the whole game but down the stretch,” assessed Kendall Gill (23 points, nine rebounds, three steals), “we really stepped in up, especially defensively.”

Maybe the game was won in the rousing final 6:40 when Van Horn completed an end-game blanket job on Derrick Coleman, but the tone was set for the Nets (22-33) early in the second quarter when veteran Johnny Newman flicked the ball away from rookie Eddie Robinson, sprawled on the floor and knocked it ahead to Stephon Marbury. In turn, Marbury fed Jamie Feick who drove and got a 3-point play.

“That was what we needed,” said Newman. “I thought we were kind of sleepwalking and a simple thing like diving for a loose ball can turn a team around.”

“I don’t expect anything different from [Newman],” said Marbury after nailing 21 points and passing for a season-high 15 assists, several of them “Play-of-the-Week” quality while also providing one of those celebration moments when he banked in a 45-footer to close the first quarter.

Enthused and energized from that point, the Nets withstood the Hornets (30-24) in the stretch. A familiar plot was unfolding as the Nets. who led throughout the second half, suddenly slipped behind the Hornets, who needed to overcome the swirling controversy brought by Anthony Mason’s latest legal problems. Mason was arrested in Manhattan in the early morning hours and charged with assault. He arrived after the start of the game and entered with 6:24 left in the first half.

“It was on my mind,” said Mason, “but I’m not going to make excuses.”

Or field goals. Mason missed his only two shots and was decidedly sub-par, scoring six free throw points. The Hornets got their usual excellence from Eddie Jones (23 points) and got a big step-up effort from ex-Net Coleman (24 points) but in the end, it was all New Jersey. Van Horn registered a huge block and steal at Coleman’s expense as the game shifted irrevocably to the Nets’ side.

Two Mason free throws at 9:45 eased Charlotte into an 87-86 lead but then Jim McIlvaine dunked and Van Horn scored in the paint. After a McIlvaine goal-tend on David Wesley made it a one-point spread, Van Horn grabbed the game by the throat.

“Keith played extremely well. He carried us,” Marbury allowed.

After bumping the lead up to 92-89 on an off-balance shot where he fell and landed on his left wrist, Van Horn came down and blocked a Coleman shot. Then he went back and dunked off a Gill feed. Back the other way, he stole a Wesley pass away from Coleman and that led to one free throw from Kerry Kittles (13 points), who delivered a back-breaker at 2:37 with a right corner jumper for a 97-90 lead.

“Definitely, the key was holding them to 12 points in the fourth quarter,” said Van Horn, who checked Coleman to one fourth quarter point and five missed shots. “Any time in a close game, you hold a team to 12 points in the fourth, if you play even halfway decent offensively, you should win.”

And the Nets truly were a little better than halfway decent.

“We were making big plays on both ends,” said Don Casey, whose gang faces a five-game trip starting tomorrow in Utah. “There were multiple contributions.”

And above everything else, there was defense.