ATLANTA — As the Nets matched the Hawks shot-for-shot throughout the first three quarters of their game on Wednesday night, Brook Lopez was at the heart of the action.
Lopez was the best player through those three quarters, looking like a guy well-worth the investment of a three-year max contract this summer — particularly in the third quarter, when he scored 16 points to allow the Nets to enter the fourth only trailing by two.
But then, when the game needed to be won, Lopez couldn’t be found. Not only did he get a five-minute break to start the fourth — an understandable rest, given he already had logged nearly 31 minutes — but he got just one shot once he came back in as the Hawks inevitably pulled away and emerged with a 101-87 win in front of 14,044 fans at Philips Arena, sending Brooklyn to a fifth-straight loss to open the season.
“That happens,” Nets coach Lionel Hollins said. “That happens. Sometimes he gets shots. Sometimes he doesn’t.
“We go to him. We run a play for him, we throw it into the post, and they make him throw it out. There’s nothing more we can do about that.”
And that, in a nutshell, is Brooklyn’s biggest problem.
Hollins is right, in a sense. The problem with having your best player be a big man — and Lopez undoubtedly is the Nets’ best player — is that you need someone to get him the ball. That’s why you’re far more likely to see a guard fire up a long-range shot than a big man get the ball in the post in the final seconds of a game, because entry passes aren’t easy.
The Hawks know this, as any good team does, and when the game was on the line, they made sure Lopez couldn’t get the ball. Instead, they were perfectly fine with letting the rest of the Nets try to beat them — and they couldn’t, going a combined 6-for-19 from the field in the fourth while the Hawks went 10-for-17.
“[The Hawks] made some plays, hit some big shots, and we just didn’t convert,” said Lopez, who finished with 27 points and 11 rebounds. “They made a run, and unfortunately we didn’t respond to that, which was unfortunate because we played so well for the entirety of the game to that point.”
As you would expect with an 0-5 team, there are plenty of problems at both ends of the court. When things began to fall apart for the Nets in the second half, as the Hawks shot 59 percent from the floor and 50 percent (6-for-12) from 3-point range, it was largely — as Hollins pointed out after the game — because the Hawks’ guards had a field day getting into the paint against their Nets counterparts. Atlanta’s Dennis Schroder recovered from an awful first half to finish with 20 points playing in place of sharpshooter Kyle Korver (being worked back slowly after offseason ankle surgery), while Jeff Teague had 16 points and 10 assists.
“First of all, we have to guard the ball,” Hollins said. “We had a lot of blow-bys. If I went back and checked the stats, we had a lot of times where they came down and blew by us.
“It’s hard to help in that situation, and when they do they throw to a guy that’s open, he throws to another guy that’s open, and we’re just scrambling all over the place.”
The Nets have spent the past five games scrambling all over the place and getting nowhere as a result. That’s how they find themselves with an 0-5 record — and with what is incredibly a must-win game for them Friday night at home against the Lakers (one of the few teams that possibly could be described as being a bigger mess at this point), given how difficult their remaining schedule is this month.
These already are desperate times in Brooklyn, a mere eight days into the regular season — and there doesn’t appear to be any relief in sight.