Some Nets news and notes from around the web:
- Jay-Z played New Year’s Eve with Coldplay at Barclays Center, and spent how much on a bottle of champagne!?
- Wait, maybe that’s not so much after all: according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires, Mikhail Prokhorov lost $95.76 million yesterday, 383 times the cost of Jay’s champagne, or roughly 1.07 times what he’ll pay Joe Johnson over four years.
- Howard Beck delves deeply into the crisis of Deron Williams: “No one compares Williams with (Los Angeles Clippers point guard Chris) Paul anymore, and he might not even make a top-10 list of point guards. As of Tuesday, he had the 20th-best player efficiency rating at his position. Williams’s struggles are not the sole reason the Nets have lost 11 of their last 16 games. They are having erratic production from Joe Johnson, their other All-Star, and a once-promising bench has faltered badly. Injuries to Brook Lopez and Gerald Wallace have disrupted their fragile chemistry. Nor was Williams the sole culprit in the Nets’ humiliating 104-73 loss to the San Antonio Spurs on Monday. He scored all 5 of their points in a record-low third quarter. Yet undeniably it is Williams who, as the point guard and the franchise star, carries the greatest burden and who has the greatest ability to reverse the Nets’ fortunes, if only he can find his game.”
- Zach Lowe of Grantland likes C.J. Watson’s propensity for inbounds thieving: “It’s delightful to watch, and it’ll work now and then, even though every smart team has included the tendency in scouting reports and warned inbounds passers repeatedly.”
