AUBURN HILLS – When times are good, he is the face and the voice and the aura of Net prosperity. His roar can be heard across the NBA, his audacious chest-thumping glee a rhythmic admonition to the rest of the Eastern Conference. When times are good, you never have to look at a scoreboard as long as Kenyon Martin is around.
Times weren’t so good for the Nets last night.
And Martin, he wasn’t so loud. He wasn’t so bold. He wasn’t so brash. The Nets kept missing shots. They kept wasting fast-break opportunities. They kept putting the basketball in places where the likes of Ben Wallace and Rasheed Wallace and Mehmet Okur could swat it halfway to Saginaw. They needed their muscle to step forward and do something, anything, to keep the Pistons within reach.
But their muscle couldn’t do that. Kenyon Martin picked up early fouls. He missed a bunch of early shots. His offensive twitch-moves, so devastating against the Knicks, barely drew a flinch out of the Pistons. And as the deficit kept growing – to 10, to 15, to 18, finally to 22, the final score, 78-56 – there was nothing much to crow about.
“What can you do?” Martin said, shrugging his shoulders, when the dismantling was done. “Do you want me to say the series is over because we lost one game? I’m not going to do that.”
Martin wasn’t the lone Nets culprit in this calamitous performance. There were plenty of places to turn if you wanted to assign blame for the single-worst offensive performance (by 18, no less) in the team’s playoff history.
Richard Jefferson, normally Martin’s partner in petulance, took 12 shots and missed 11 of them. Jason Collins had five fouls to go along with zero points and two rebounds. Even Jason Kidd was significantly less than spectacular, turning in a triple single (nine points, seven rebounds, six assists) when the Nets were dying for something special from their captain.
Still, it is Martin whose passion, whose energy, whose skill and physical presence drive the Nets, and while he finished with 11 points and five rebounds, both numbers were church-quiet. The Wallaces swallowed him whole. So, remarkably, did Okur. The Palace crowd, especially the courtside denizens, seem to take far more joy in degrading Martin than they did in cheering their own team.
“Kenyon!” they screamed, during one foul-driven shift on the bench. “Where are you?”
It was a fair question that many of his teammates might have asked, if any of them had bothered to show up.
Martin’s night seemed to best exemplify what the rest of the Nets were enduring, and with good reason. From a skill-player standpoint, the Nets are the better team. Even given their numerous woes last night, the Nets still outscored Detroit 19-9 in transition, for instance. But what the Nets needed was someone to set a tone, a dark, muscular tone, with a hard dunk, a tough rebound, a bone-rattling screen.
Martin is their man on those issues. He couldn’t deliver this time. And the Nets withered on the vine.
“Unlike most teams around this league that have eight days off and make excuses, we aren’t going to do that,” Martin said, which, of course, was his way of saying, “What did you expect? We had eight days off!”
The problem wasn’t the eight days off, in the same way the three off-days better not be an issue by the time this series resumes on Friday night. By then, it would be helpful if the Nets could, say, break 30 percent from the field, go from there. But it would be more beneficial if their heart and soul came armed with the same sneer he showed the Knicks up close.
Or else they shouldn’t even bother taking the plane back here.
