The Nets spent most of Friday night looking like a team that actually learned something from Wednesday’s mess at Madison Square Garden. And then, when the game demanded the smallest details, Brooklyn let it slip anyway.
That’s the brutal part of their 130-126 double-overtime loss to the Boston Celtics at Barclays Center. The Nets looked like they’d turned a page in stretches, but you’re not fixing everything overnight, and the same late-game issues that have haunted them all season popped back up when it mattered most. And against a disciplined team like Boston, you have to slam the door shut, and they couldn’t.
The effort was there. The urgency was there. The finish was not.
“It’s a lot for us to learn,” Nic Claxton said. “It’s a tough loss, obviously, so we just got to watch the film and get better from it.”
The first overtime should’ve been the end of it. Noah Clowney seemed to put Brooklyn ahead for good with 41.6 seconds left in the extra session. Rookie Nolan Traore, who finished with a career-high 21 points off the bench, and Ziaire Williams looked ready to ice it at the line, combining for five straight free throws until Traore finally missed with 2.5 seconds left.
That’s all Boston needed. The Celtics didn’t need a two. They needed a 3-pointer. And the Nets, for all the toughness they showed across 50-plus minutes, cracked at the wrong time.
“He was just wide open,” Claxton said of the corner 3-pointer Hugo Gonzalez hit to force a second overtime. “He was wide open. He hit the shot.”
It was the kind of moment that makes you double-check the replay just to make sure you saw it right. Claxton didn’t have an explanation when asked about the breakdown after the game. And Head coach Jordi Fernández didn’t sugarcoat it, either. Brooklyn’s late-game defense has been good enough plenty of nights. Friday just wasn’t one of them.
“We all remember the last three, obviously the mistakes that we’ve made,” Fernández said. “And we’ve executed late-game well in many games, especially defensively. And today it was two situations where we could’ve been better.”
One of those situations was painfully basic. The kind of thing teams drill for exactly this reason. The other was carelessness that led to Gonzalez’s clean look. Claxton boiled it down to the same thing, only with a player’s bluntness.
“Just knowing when to foul,” Claxton said. “When we’re up, we were up five points, knowing when to foul. Can’t give up threes, can’t give up those threes, and fix some coverages.”
The Nets did a lot right in this game. They fought back. They showed real competitiveness. They made Boston work. But the last few possessions were the story. Not because they didn’t try, but because they didn’t execute. And in this league, especially against Boston, that’s the difference between a win you can build on and a loss that continues to sting days later.
“We lost. That’s all I really care about,” Michael Porter Jr. said. “I don’t care about no fight, personally. Obviously, it was a better performance collectively than last game, but we still lost. So, it was a game we should have won. We’ve lost too many games this year that come down to the wire like this.”
