NEW YORK_The Boston Celtics have made a habit of taking whatever little the Brooklyn Nets have. They have the Nets' draft picks, of course, but Friday night, in an arena full of green shirts _ some celebrating St. Patrick's Day, most celebrating Isaiah Thomas _ it was more than that.
They took the Nets' cheers, they took their momentum, and they took their chance at finally _ finally! _ winning back to back games.
A day after a rousing win against the New York Knicks, the Nets' rally was quashed by the Celtics, as they fell, 98-95, at Barclays Center. The Celtics did it while appearing to play at half speed for half the game, and without Thomas, who was out with a knee bruise. The Nets, meanwhile, lost by playing frantic, desperate basketball _ crawling back from hole after hole before eventually falling on three errant three-point attempts as time expired. They fell to an NBA-worst 13-55 for their effort.
Randy Foye hit a layup with 10.4 seconds left to draw the Nets within two, but Avery Bradley hit one of his two free throws to set off a wild finish, in which Brook Lopez, Quincy Acy and Foye all attempted to tie it (Foye's shot came after time was up).
"I was confident," Lopez said of the potential game-tying shot "I thought it was going in ... .We fought until literally the very end."
"I thought we did a good job executing," Nets coach Kenny Atkinson said. "Credit to them, they hit some big shots down at the end ... but the positive I take is that we're learning to play when shots aren't falling for us. That's important. In the first half, we couldn't throw it in the ocean, but we kept defending, kept defending."
Boston's Jae Crowder led all scorers with 24 points and added 12 rebounds. Lopez scored 23 and Acy had 10 points with eight assists for the Nets.
Although it was a bumpy road, Crowder's pull-up three with a little less than four minutes left broke a tie at 85 and gave the Celtics the lead for good. He had a dunk with 2:52 left, and completed the three-point play to give the Celtics the 91-85 advantage. The Nets _ outmatched on paper and on the court _ made a valiant effort in the second half, both in the opening minutes of the third quarter and down the stretch in the fourth.
The Nets hit three threes in the first minute and a half of the fourth quarter _ one apiece from Foye, Andrew Nicholson, and Acy, who gave the Nets a 74-71 lead and did a little celebratory jig as the Celtics called a timeout. The Nets trailed by 10 with 2:57 left in the third, despite taking a short-lived lead at the beginning of that quarter on the force of a 12-3 run.
That the Nets ever had the opportunity to rally was somewhat stunning in itself. For the first part of the game, the Celtics matched their mediocracy, non-basket for non-basket. The Celtics shot 3-for-13 from three in the first half, compared with the Nets' 3-for-18, and nearly allowed the Nets to tie the game with two minutes left in the second quarter, through no effort of the Nets' own.
Jeremy Lin's free throws with 2:04 left drew the Nets to within 36-34 with 2:04 left, but Rondae Hollis-Jefferson's three-point attempt 30 seconds later went wide. The Celtics closed the quarter on a 9-3 run to go into halftime with a 45-37 lead.
