It’s funny how vital the Brooklyn Nets are. You will hardly be able to find a sport in which a team goes to matches being more favorite outside the home than inside. That is what is currently happening with the New Yorkers, who in the morning have managed to break a streak of five consecutive defeats on their own track. They have done it with a victory in overtime (121-119) against the San Antonio Spurs who fight tooth and nail to be in the play-in of a soulless West. And tooth and nail they also fought to win this victory that, with 4 minutes remaining in regulation time, no one imagined that they could take it.
The Nets were leading by 10 and 12 with five to go. The situation was apparently under control. But with this team, which is supposedly one of the favorites in the ring (and by names like that it has to be), nothing is certain. Because just as they are playing well, they start to do it badly without explanation, they stop defending and open the door to the rival. This happened until the Spurs ended up tying the game. Harden (26 points, 12 assists and 7 rebounds) and Durant (28) were dedicated to missing everything they threw in the last moments of the fourth quarter. The second had more than one pitch to avoid extra time, but it was not the end of the game that one imagines when you think about it. In the penultimate play of overtime the Spurs did not let him even shoot and the ball ended up in the hands of rookie Cam Thomas, the ultimate hero of a team that continues to leave more doubts than certainties.
The Spurs will go to the hotel (they are still in New York where they visit the Knicks tomorrow) thinking that they had the last shot both in regulation time and in overtime, but neither of them with enough time to find a clear option. But it will make them angry anyway. They know that facing the Nets in Brooklyn now is better than doing it on your own court. As long as Kyrie Irving can only play outside, the team is much more with him than without him. Until today’s win, the Nets had only won one of their last six games. The one they played out in Indiana. With Kyrie, of course. Seen like this, it may not be so bad for them to continue losing until they fall to fifth place in the East. This way they would have a field disadvantage in the qualifying rounds and could have more games with the point guard. A surreal sporting situation that only makes a strange season even more difficult for them.
