THE hope was that games like this were part of a distant and none-too-glorious past for the Nets.
There was a time last year, with Richard Jefferson out and Jason Kidd hurting and the season heading nowhere fast when the only reason to watch the Nets was to see if Vince Carter was going to wear his wrist out, shooting early and shooting late and jacking up one jumper after another, making one acrobatic move after another to the basket.
As a carnival act, Carter launching 33 shots always has been something to see.
In the context of a basketball season, and in the narrower context of a basketball team with rarefied ambitions making a case for itself as a legitimate player in the Eastern Conference, it’s a little harder on the eyes, and a little sterner on the soul.
“We didn’t play our best basketball,” is what Carter said yesterday, maybe a half-hour after old friend Anthony Johnson had drained a couple of free throws to officially hand the Nets a 90-88 loss in the first game of this conference quarterfinal playoff series, a sour start to what the Nets want to believe is a journey back to Eastern prominence.
The Nets rarely do play their best when Carter attempts 33 shots, and certainly don’t when he misses 19 of them, when he misfires on seven of eight from beyond the 3-point arc, when he can’t get it going from outside or inside or anywhere in between.
“I had a double negative going,” Carter said. “I couldn’t hit a jump shot and I couldn’t make any of my lay-ups.”
For the Nets, that’s always going to be a permanent negative, because on those nights when Carter can’t find the range, they aren’t going to be able to find their footing, their confidence, or any semblance of an offense, either.
Across the last weeks of the regular season, it seemed the Nets were settling back into the pleasing, mellifluous style that had carried them so far in Kidd’s earliest hours with the team. Yes, they’d traded in Kenyon Martin’s power for Carter’s flash, but it all seemed to be melding perfectly.
There was balance to the attack again. There was rhythm. Carter still got his, of course, but when he gets his within the parameters of a Kidd-run offense, that’s perfectly acceptable.
What happened yesterday, from beginning to end, was not.
“We know,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said, “that we’re not going to see Vince Carter play another game like that.”
It’s good that Carlisle can feel that secure, that confident, because one of these days the Carter Nets are going to have to start measuring up not only to their own high postseason expectations, but also to the standards the franchise set in both 2002 and 2003, when they first learned and later perfected the art of winning playoff games in this conference.
Someone brought up to Lawrence Frank that the Nets had now lost seven straight playoff games (and four in a row at the Meadowlands) if you go back to Game 6 of the 2004 Eastern semis, and Frank, rightfully, scoffed at that number.
“If this were the same team, maybe I’d be worried,” Frank said. “But this team, it’s only 0-1. Some of those losses happened two years ago.”
What isn’t irrelevant, not completely, is that Carter is now 0-5 in the postseason as a Net, and 0-3 at home. Yes, that takes into account last year, when the Nets were lucky to sneak into the playoffs as a No. 8 seed, when the Heat swept them, when Jefferson was barely a factor thanks to a long stint on the injured list, when Carter was essentially the only heartbeat the Nets could rely on.
But now you have to count this one, too. In the old days, when these first-round series were best-of-five crapshoots, it would have inspired a fair strand of panic, but in these best-of-seven times, the Nets have plenty of room to recover who they are and what they are. Is that going to be 33 shots for Vince Carter? If so, the playoffs in Jersey are going to be a troublingly familiar song: short, and not nearly as sweet as they used to be.
