Check out the advanced box score from last night’s 106-89 Brooklyn Nets Game 1 victory here.
Some final takeaways:
- If this is what the Bulls will look like with a hobbled Joakim Noah, this will be a short series. The Brooklyn Nets exploited a porous interior defense, led by porous interior defender Carlos Boozer, and got most of their attempts going towards the basket. 35 of the team’s 77 field goal attempts were in the restricted area, and they made 26 of them. That’s 52 easy points even before considering the fouls drawn near the basket. Brook Lopez, Deron Williams, Andray Blatche, even Gerald Wallace got to the rim with ease.
- For more on how Deron Williams eviscerated that interior defense, Mike Prada broke it down to a science. In short: Hinrich can’t defend Williams one-on-one for a variety of reasons (hand-checking rules, Williams’s damn-goodedness), and since Boozer was supposed to be the primary help for Hinrich defending Williams, Williams would watch Boozer and make his move depending on how much attention Boozer was paying to his defensive assignment. Hint: Boozer’s not good at paying attention.
- Games like last night make you wonder how the Nets would look if Gerald Wallace played with that type of effectiveness all season long.
- Good to see Mr. Whammy get some national T.V. time, even though he wasn’t participating in the blackout.
- I was not in Brooklyn last night — I covered the game from outside of the region — so I didn’t see what was called an “extravagant” pre-game celebration. From Zach Schonbrun:
The Nets transformed Barclays Center into a grand postseason stage, with dark T-shirts and luminous bracelets, banners and baked goods, fireworks and a drum line, one glorious self-tribute after another.
It was like a concert, Chicago Bulls forward Taj Gibson said. The arena glistened like a gemstone. All that was left, after the team’s owner, Mikhail D. Prokhorov, addressed the crowd and the lights flooded back onto the court, was a basketball game, and a fairly important one for the franchise.
Just reaching this point was not the team’s ultimate ambition, as much as the pregame festivities suggested it was.
- Before the game, Nets interim head coach P.J. Carlesimo said he’d probably go with a nine-man rotation that possibly stretched to 10, and he did just that: plus the five starters, three players played 10 minutes or more (C.J. Watson, Andray Blatche, Jerry Stackhouse), a fourth (Keith Bogans) played 9:57, and Kris Humphries played a tick under eight minutes. The final three guys — MarShon Brooks, Mirza Teletovic, Tyshawn Taylor — came off the bench only for the final 1:19 when the game’s outcome was no longer in doubt.
- As the Nets and others have noted, this was the first playoff victory in Brooklyn since October 9th, 1956, when the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series.
- Reggie Evans set an NBA record for the best total rebounding percentage of all time with at least 50 games played this season, grabbing an estimated 26.7% of all available rebounds. Reggie Evans’s total rebound percentage last night? 26.7%. Quintessential Reggie Evans.
- Minutes watch: Wallace, Lopez, Evans all played above their season average, Williams & Johnson played below.
