ATLANTA — The Nets have enough capable defenders that they’ve shown they can play stretches of solid defense.
But against the better teams, those stretches haven’t been long enough or consistent enough.
With some rare practice time, that’s what Brooklyn has been trying to shore up.
And the Nets get a chance to put their work to the test Wednesday versus the Hawks — one of those high-powered teams they’ve struggled against.
“It’s a discipline,” Nets coach Jacque Vaughn said. “It’s leaning more into always instead of sometimes. And we have been sometimes pretty good in position. We need to shift that into always, whether that’s always defending and being in our right position, whether that’s always kicking the ball ahead and having multiple ball-handlers, whether that’s always playing with pace once we get a rebound.
“That’s our challenge as a group. And when you play the better teams, it just gets emphasized even more because if you don’t do it, you’re going to lose. So, for us, we’re learning those lessons especially when you’re playing against high-level teams.”
The Nets enter Wednesday’s game at 6-7, having slogged through one of the toughest early slates in the league.
The Nets have played just four losing teams, and beaten all of them.
They will play another one on Wednesday when they tangle against the 6-7 Hawks who lost a 157-152 shootout to the Pacers on Tuesday night.
They’re just 2-7 against the rest.
“One, we’ve got to defend: Understand what they want to do and how we can best take that away,” Cam Johnson said. “That’s what a big part of the league is about. And then be able to spin that into transition opportunities and buckets on our own end. Just continue to play aggressive and free and understand that we’re gonna get good shots and just keep shooting them if they’re not falling.”
That defense has been sorely lacking against viable squads.
Though Brooklyn is 23rd in the league in Defensive Rating, that has bottomed out against good teams. The Nets have held four losing clubs to just 103.75 points, but surrendered 118.3 to the nine others they’ve played.
That’s one of the priorities in practice.
They’re hard to come by once the grind of the season starts, with just one “official” practice since the opener until having one on Saturday and again Tuesday, drilling down on consistency.
“Concepts, principles,” Johnson said. “We want to be and being committed to those throughout 48 minutes instead of 24, 30, 32, whatever.”
Film doesn’t lie, and it clearly tells the tale of a lack of physical resistance.
“One of them is just physicality. Physicality and then just a slight second and third effort, and covering for each other,” Johnson said. “A lot of it is head-on-a-swivel, trying to be in the right spot. But we can touch teams up a little more.”
If the Nets don’t touch — and disrupt — Trae Young, they almost assuredly will suffer a third straight loss.
Young enters Wednesday averaging 23.4 points and 11.1 assists, with double-doubles in his last three games.
He beat the Nets 129-127 on a game-winning buzzer-beater in their last visit to Atlanta on Feb. 26.
Spencer Dinwiddie had been trying to contest from behind on the play but was afraid to get whistled for a foul.
They’ll face a Hawks team playing faster than last season, and Jalen Johnson’s 15.0 points per game gives them a viable third option behind Young and Dejounte Murray.
It will test the Nets’ defense, one that saw them going back to basics Tuesday.
“You always want to improve in every aspect, just communication-wise, whether it’s somebody’s cutting or we’re helping rotate to somebody else, or even it’s a mismatch and we’ve got to help out and double-team or something, getting the ball out of somebody’s hand,” Royce O’Neale said. “So just little stuff like that, we have a collective group coming together.
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