Coming off their best effort of the season, the Nets cratered with their worst offensive showing of the year.
Brooklyn got smothered 110-94 by the visiting Pistons before a sellout crowd of 17,548 at Barclays Center on Friday night.
It came on the heels of a 125-124 overtime heartbreaker in Boston, when they led for much of the night in TD Garden and looked cohesive and competitive. They were neither against visiting Detroit.
The defeat didn’t just keep the Nets winless at 0-5. In their first NBA Cup tilt of the season — where point differential is the second tiebreaker, right after head-to-head — it put them behind the eight ball already in Group A, against Toronto, Orlando and Milwaukee.
And certainly against these Pistons, who gave them a caning.
“Yeah, a lot of physicality, ball pressure. We have to handle that offensively, taking care of the ball, being spaced properly, our setups and so forth,” Nets coach Jordi Fernández had warned beforehand. “Getting back in transition, they’re playing fast and starting with Cade [Cunningham], throwing the ball ahead and pushing, and then him in pick-and-roll and scoring in different ways. Three-level scorer, super player, very well-coached team, team that plays extremely hard.
“It’s physical, like I said. So it’s a good challenge for us. I think all these games that are coming, you would think, ‘Oh, we have a lot of playing against top teams.’ And I think that’s the best thing for us because it’s pushing us to get the best of ourselves. And we saw it in Boston. I think that we competed at a good level. I think we can still be better. But if we have the same level of intensity and we show a connected group, I think we’ll be completely fine.”
The Nets weren’t any kind of fine.
Brooklyn shot just 40.3 percent overall and 11 of 37 from 3-point range, committing almost two dozen turnovers.
The Nets actually played feisty defense at times, holding the Pistons to 42.2 percent and 12-for-41 from 3. But they got outscored 27-11 in fast-break points, and the Pistons ran them off their own court in the second and third quarters when they combined for 13 turnovers and just nine baskets.
Cunningham finished with a game-high 20 points.
Moritz Wagner led the Nets with 16, and Julius Randle had 15.
Brooklyn had their first double-digit lead of the young season when they went ahead 33-23 on Randle’s free throw with 10:44 left in the second quarter.
And they were still ahead 37-29 on his foul shot 1:17 later.
But that’s when their offense got overwhelmed by Detroit’s dominant defense.
The Nets coughed up a 27-12 Pistons run to close the half, flipping an eight-point cushion into a seven-point deficit that just grew in the third quarter.
To end the first half, Brooklyn missed 11 of their final 12 shots — including smoking a pair of layups — and committed four turnovers. By the time they fell asleep defensively themselves and gave up Ausar Thompson’s driving reverse layup with less than a second left in the half, they trailed 56-49 heading into the locker room.
Once they came back out, things just got worse.
After shooting just 3-for-14 in the second quarter, they gave away eight turnovers in the third.
As bad as the missed shots were, the giveaways were far worse. Brooklyn got outscored 12-0 in points off turnovers in that third quarter, one that saw them blitzed 36-17.
The game was never close from there.
The Nets trailed by as many as 30 on their home floor in the fourth, down 96-66 on a bucket by Paul Reed.
Detroit’s backup center was only starting because All-NBA star Jalen Duren was out with a hamstring strain. It turns out the Pistons didn’t need him.
