MEMPHIS, Tenn. — It’s still early, but the Nets have had a couple of weeks of data to learn this new team, to see what works and what gets them worked over.
What they’ve found out the hard way was less Julius Randle iso ball and more dribble handoffs, less watching and more moving.
“It’s a little bit of both. Earlier in the year, obviously you’re trying to [learn],” Michael Porter Jr. admitted heading into Saturday’s tilt at Memphis. “We didn’t get a chance to play a lot of games with Julius. But Julius doesn’t want to sit around and iso all game, either. So we’ve had conversations in film sessions where we’re just seeing what works, and then we’re trying to use each player to their skill sets.
“I know Day’Ron [Sharpe] can really pass the ball as well. He can, he’s good in the [dribble handoff]. So, him getting more usage out of that is helping him play better as well. So I think that we’re a ball-movement and a player-movement team. And then we have the luxury of having Julius, who can get those tough buckets off the dribble in those iso situations. So it’s a balance.”
Brooklyn was all kinds of unbalanced to start the season.
Between poor spacing, a lack of movement — both the ball sticking and players not running to their spots — and a certain amount of natural deferring to the Nets’ only All-Star and their best on-ball scorer since the Kevin Durant-Kyrie Irving era, the offense stagnated.
Through their first five games, the Nets went winless and looked terrible. Randle was averaging 5.4 isos — granted, often catching so-called grenades as the shot clock wound down. Their Offensive Rating sat at a wretched 104.8, and the fifth-worst Net Rating in the league.
But they’ve looked much better in splitting the past six games. Randle’s isos have more than halved down to 2.3. Instead, Porter leads the league in DHOs at 5.1; but he’s seen them bump from 4.6 to 5.5, per Clutchpoints. And Sharpe has seen his assists vault from 1.2 in the winless start to 6.5 in the 3-3 run since.
The Nets have been the beneficiary coming into the Grizzlies game, with the Offensive Rating spiking to 113.4 and their Net Rating vaulting to a more solid 15th.
“We’ve always been running our offense like that. The first couple games of the season, it was like we got a lot of new players. So we’re trying to figure out each other’s game, especially with Julius,” Sharpe said. “He brings a lot of gravity, so I’m trying to find out how to play off him. We’re all trying to figure out how to play off of him. After film, after talks, we figured out what’s working best for us. And I feel we just keep doing that and keep building towards that.”
The Nets divide their season into five-game blocks. And it took a winless first section for them to figure out what worked, and what was getting them worked over.
Brooklyn coach Jordi Fernández said it wasn’t so much a wholesale change of the playbook or what was being run. As the Nets learned each other, they’ve just started running those same plays better, and with more conviction and precision.
“We run the same plays, but they were not run with the same purpose,” Fernández said. “You see now Julius is finishing at the rim, how decisive he is with his drives, how much [more] active [Porter] has been with his cutting and mixing up his cuts and coming to the ball, and also Day’Ron catching it low and feeling comfortable with assisting or making those passes.
“So it just speaks of the work that the group is putting in, adjusting who I am in this new group and how can I be better for the group? And all these guys that I’ve mentioned — not just these three — but everybody is trying to do the right things not for themselves but for the group.”
