The Nets know how these nights go by now.
The early hole. The climb. The brief surge that makes the building lean forward. The possessions that decide whether momentum turns into something more. The ones that don’t.
Monday’s loss to the Dallas Mavericks was the fourth straight for Brooklyn and the seventh in eight games. The numbers tell that part clearly enough. What they don’t fully capture is how familiar the path there has become.
Slow starts. Chasing from behind. Just enough resistance to make the outcome feel undecided. Not quite enough execution to change it. Against Dallas, the signs were there almost immediately.
Missed 3-pointers that should have fallen. Defensive gaps that were punished quickly. A team still searching for its footing while the opponent found rhythm. The Nets weren’t out of the game by the end of the first quarter, but they were already reacting to it.
That’s been the pattern.
Brooklyn has had stretches where the energy rises. Lineups settle. Defensive effort sharpens. The ball moves. The deficit shrinks. And for a few minutes, it looks like the game is about to swing in its favor.
Then it doesn’t.
A missed rotation. A rushed shot. A turnover that becomes points the other way. Small moments that don’t feel decisive on their own but stack quickly, especially when the margin is thin to begin with.
Dallas made those moments count. The Mavericks spaced the floor, knocked down open looks and turned Brooklyn’s mistakes into efficient offense. The Nets, meanwhile, kept generating shots they wanted and missing too many of them. That imbalance has been costly during this stretch, particularly against teams that don’t need many openings to separate.
It’s not that Brooklyn hasn’t competed. Effort hasn’t been the issue. Individual performances have kept the Nets close often enough to make the losses sting. The fight has been there. So has the frustration.
Because the repetition is hard to ignore at this point in the season.
Brooklyn briefly found itself late in December, stringing together wins behind a league-best defense and showing signs of cohesion. That stretch hinted at progress. But since then, the same flaws have crept back in, erasing that momentum and returning the Nets to a familiar place in the standings.
Injuries and absences have forced adjustments and stretched the rotation. That part is real. But it hasn’t fully explained what keeps happening once the ball goes up. The issues have shown up regardless of who’s available. Early urgency hasn’t matched the stakes. Late-game execution hasn’t been clean enough to flip results.
As January continues, the questions facing Brooklyn are not dramatic ones. There’s no mystery about what needs fixing. Cleaner starts. Sharper communication. More patience when games slow down. Fewer possessions thrown away when the margin is smallest.
Those aren’t sweeping changes. They’re habits.
Until they stick, which we’ve seen they can, the outcomes are likely to keep looking the same. The Nets have shown they can compete. What they haven’t shown, consistently enough, is the ability to turn that competitiveness into control.
And until those habits change, the endings will keep looking the same.
