The most underrated part of any defensive possession is the end: securing a rebound.
It doesn’t matter how solid the defensive principles are, how much length and athleticism is on the floor, how versatile the defenders are or if that versatility allows you to switch one through five defensively.
Every defense will crumble if the opponent has multiple attempts at a basket on a single possession.
Such is the state of affairs for a Nets team that ranks second-to-last in rebounding behind only the Dallas Mavericks, who do not have a true center on the roster.
The Nets only have one — Nic Claxton — who is a lock to play every single night. And because the Nets play an aggressive style of defense tailored to Claxton’s ability to switch defensively while also helping from the weak side to block shots at the rim, the Nets are susceptible to being pummeled on the offensive glass.
“Yeah, we have to accept it. It’s truth. It’s staring us in the face,” head coach Jacque Vaughn said after Sunday’s matinee loss to the Denver Nuggets.
Two Nuggets players — Nikola Jokic and Michael Porter Jr. — combined to out-rebound the entire Nets starting lineup.
“The scouting report says to try to go offensive rebound vs. the Nets, and we have to understand that and really do a diligent job of continuing to try and do it together. We can’t do it with two people, with three people. We show clips at halftime where literally we need all five people to come back and get a piece of somebody,” Vaughn said.
The issue, however, is two-fold: This is hardly a well-kept secret, and the solution — crashing the glass — goes against the core identity of a team built to play fast, get out in transition and generate offense by shooting an obscene number of threes.
Not to mention the Nets just don’t have the personnel: Ben Simmons is a strong rebounder who is out due to a combination of left knee and back soreness and has no timetable for a return, and second-year center Day’Ron Sharpe — a noted glass-cleaner — has not been able to crack the rotation.
Vaughn instead opts to play small with either Royce O’Neale, Dorian Finney-Smith or, in rare cases, Yuta Watanabe playing backup five.
It was easier to sweep the rebounding struggles under the rug under the guise of supremely talented offensive superstars returning from injury to save the day.
Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, however, are not walking through that door, and this is a Nets team that must now save itself as it embarks on a stretch of games that project to determine whether or not Brooklyn will need to compete in the Play-In Tournament to solidify its seeding as an Eastern Conference playoff team.
“I know we’re capable of doing it. We did it before,” said O’Neale, who ranks second on the team in rebounds per game despite his listed height of 6-5. “Just everybody paying a little more attention to detail to it, helping Nic out.”
The loss to the Nuggets marked Brooklyn’s third in a row and moved the Nets 2.5 games below the Knicks, who sit fifth in the conference. More concerning is the other side of the standings: The loss moved Brooklyn just one game ahead of the seventh-seeded Miami Heat, who appear to have turned a corner after a slow start and have won six of their last 10 games.
The Nets entered Monday with 11 games remaining on the schedule. The next four are brutal for a team with such a glaring rebounding weakness: The Nets host the Cleveland Cavaliers — who start two seven-footers: Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley — two games in a row. Then they travel to Miami for a date with Bam Adebayo and the surging Heat before hitting the road to face Orlando for the second leg of a back-to-back.
The Magic play five players 6-10 or taller significant minutes, making them a nightmare matchup for the Nets, even if their record indicates otherwise.
“You know how I am: I’m trying to really keep our guys honed in almost silo-ish in taking care of that day’s game,” Vaughn said when asked to look down the road. “I don’t want our guys looking beyond these next four hours, really, of taking care of business against this team. Our hands will be full enough. So really trying to get our guys to not look ahead and just take care of today’s work.”
And while rebounding traditionally falls on the big man down low, the Nets don’t play a style of defense that allows their center to be parked by the rim all game.
Claxton ranks 16th in the NBA in rebounding at 9.2 boards per game. He is averaging 12.6 points, 10.4 rebounds and 2.1 blocks per game while shooting just under 60% from the field in the month of March alone.
The undersized O’Neale, however, averages the second-most rebounds (6.6) per game this month. Mikal Bridges and Finney-Smith each average four rebounds per game through the team’s last nine games. Bridges recorded just one rebound in 31 minutes in Sunday’s loss to the Nuggets.
“[We have to] continue to harp on it, continue to crash the glass and just figure out our rotations and where we’re gonna be so we know where those rebounds are coming to,” said the 6-8 Cam Johnson, who averages 4.4 rebounds per game in Brooklyn but 5.8 rebounds through the team’s last nine games. “We know who our personnel is. We had more offensive rebounds than [the Nuggets] today, so it was a better rebounding battle overall compared to the last time we played them.”
The Nets, however, are leaning into being the undersized team trying to win games even if they lose the rebound margin on a nightly basis. Playing small allows them to play fast and get up threes in transition, an offensive point of emphasis now that running half court isolation sets through Durant and Irving are no longer an option.
The conundrum, of course, is that prioritizing crashing the glass means the team can’t get out in transition, where they must generate offense now that half court sets are no longer as fruitful. The Nets only had two fast break points when they found themselves down 20 entering the fourth quarter of Sunday’s loss to Denver.
“Especially when we go small and me or Doe is at the five, we all got to gang rebound,” O’Neale said. “I mean that’s our advantage and playing fast. I don’t know how many fast break points we had, but we got to get a couple more. Playing fast and with pace, that’s what we’re good at.”
()
