INDIANAPOLIS — The Nets’ gossamer-thin play-in hopes may be over before this road trip is.
The Nets didn’t so much lose, 121-100, to the Pacers before 17,009 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse as roll over when the going got tough.
Again.
Stop if you’ve heard this before.
After leading for much of the first half and trailing just 70-68 midway through the third, the Nets capitulated.
They allowed nine unanswered points and fell behind by as much as 27 in the fourth.
“We’ve got to look at ourselves, look at the film. Get better,” Dennis Schroder said. “I’m tired of keep talking about the same thing. We’ve just got to do it and win some games.”
“We’re trying to figure it out too, man. We’ve just got to do it. If they make a run we can’t just hold our heads down. We’ve just got to keep fighting,” Mikal Bridges said. “Just got to play hard the whole 48. You can’t just hold the energy for a quarter or a half. You’ve just got to play hard the whole 48.”
That’s becoming a rare thing for the Nets (26-41), who blew an opportunity to make up ground on Atlanta in the chase for the last play-in spot in the East.
They fell 3 ½ games behind the Hawks despite the latter dropping three in a row.
The Nets have lost four of five on this season-long six-game trek, which ends Sunday against the Spurs in Austin, Texas.
They only can hope they’ve found some collective grit before then.
But the sight of Schroder and Cam Johnson on the court near the end of this drubbing having a lengthy tete-a-tete, searching for answers, implies that might be a tough ask.
“Looking for solutions and how to address what’s been plaguing us for a long time and how we can get through that, because it’s on us at the end of the day,” Johnson said. “We had a good conversation about it, [but] conversations don’t mean nothing if we don’t put things into play. But we’ve got to address it.”
What’s plagued them is letting missed shots crater their defense. And Saturday, once the Pacers run started, they abandoned the game plan that worked in the first half and started playing hero ball.
Cam Thomas had a team-high 22 points and a career-high tying eight rebounds.
But Bridges had just seven points on 1 of 8 shooting.
Pascal Siakam had 28 points and 11 rebounds for Indiana, which outscored the Nets in the paint by a staggering 82-42 margin.
The Nets actually led early.
After Tyrese Haliburton had found Aaron Nesmith for a driving layup and 9-7 Pacers edge, the Nets went on an 11-2 run.
Johnson’s pull-up 3-pointer capped the spurt and put the Nets ahead 18-11.
The Nets held the lead for most of the half, but Indiana kept chipping away until they finally edged ahead, Nesmith’s right-corner 3-pointer put the Pacers ahead, 46-44, with 4:42 left in the second quarter.
It was back and forth until Haliburton rebounded a Schroder miss, and Nesmith’s and-one made it 57-53 shortly before intermission.
The Nets trailed by a deuce at the break, and it was still 70-68 after a Nic Claxton dunk before they lost contact for good.
The Nets allowed nine unanswered points, and never challenged again.
Haliburton found center Myles Turner for a dunk to cap the blitz with 4:38 left in the third.
After Johnson went up for a dunk but saw it blocked by Nesmith, it turned into a highlight going the other way.
Haliburton threw a no-look pass to Obi Toppin for a reverse dunk that padded the Pacers’ cushion to 83-70.
The deficit swelled to 27 late.
“We’ve just got to do all the tough things, and we got to do it over and over and over again. We did it first half: basketball was beautiful. Then second half we went into ISO basketball and that’s what we get when we go into ISO basketball,” interim head coach Kevin Ollie said. “You’ve got to trust your teammates. You got to make the right plays. You got to follow our gameplan.”
