The Brooklyn Nets sulked back to the visitors’ locker room after a historic, 54-point loss to the New York Knicks on Wednesday night. Jordi Fernández headed to a brief postgame presser, where he fell on the sword in his typically monotone style. Did the head coach really believe he was “responsible” for the ass-kicking, that halfway through the season “players are not responsible for it, so I got to make sure that they understand the values that we have,” or was it just something to say?
Players did
not tear the visiting locker room apart. Rookie Drake Powell mentioned that a couple veterans spoke a sentence or two, but it was not exactly a scene out of Remember the Titans. Guys got dressed leisurely, sat on their phones, and chatted — maybe slightly softer, a little more somber, than normal.
“I mean, I don’t know if I said much directly after,” said Michael Porter Jr. Friday. “We all were kind of a little — obviously just had our feelings about the game. But later that night, I texted the guys and just told them like, ‘yo, that’s my fault. I’ve got to come in with that energy.’”
To Porter Jr. and the Nets, Wednesday was not a shameful chapter in a rivalry matchup or a devastating blow to team morale. It was a bad day at work.
“It’s the time leading up to the game,” explained MPJ at Friday’s shootaround. “It’s the day off, how you spent your day off in between games, how much sleep you got. All those things play a part to how your body, your nervous system, your mind feels when it’s tip-off time. And I felt like those two days were a little shaky for me in terms of preparation, and that’s what separates the good players and the average players from the great players, that time in between.”
Playing 82 games in 170 days does not provide much time for reflection, only for routine. Nic Claxton finally used the E-word on Friday morning, but he wasn’t stewing over the loss: “I’m in the present now. We focused on tonight, we know we got to be a better team tonight, because that’s not gonna happen again. t’s unacceptable. Obviously, it was embarrassing. We’ll be ready to go tonight.”
Nets fans seeking more public atonement from their leaders were out of luck. But Porter and Claxton veterans that they’ve had to be despite being 27 and 26, didn’t have to grovel; instead, they gave the Boston Celtics (missing Derrick White) one hell of a game on Friday night.
Now, there were embarrassing moments in this one too. Barclays Center was filled Celtics fans cheering their hearts out and serenading Jaylen Brown with unmistakable “M-V-P” chants far louder than any “Broooooook-lyyyyyn” chants begun by the PA announcer. I felt particularly bad for two die-hard Nets fans in front of press row, about to triumph over the sea of green they were engulfed in before their favorite team defended a last-second sideline-out-of-bounds play befitting of their 12-31 record…
Still, Claxton and Porter fulfilled their promise. Though MPJ’s impact wavered as the game went on, he indeed brought the right energy out of the gate, cutting hard and crashing the glass. Noah Eagle called him “spry” on the YES Network broadcast. Claxton capably guarding Jaylen Brown in isolation was crucial to Brooklyn’s defensive gameplan, and Brown ultimately shot 9-of-27.
Postgame, Jordi Fernández said he was “proud of the brand of basketball we played, the competitiveness. We got better today, and that’s most important.”
MPJ respectfully disagreed: “We lost. That’s all I really care about. I don’t care about no fight, personally. Obviously it was a better performance collectively than last game, but we still lost. So it was a game we should have won. We’ve lost too many games this year that come down to the wire like this.”
Brooklyn improved their performance tenfold from Wednesday to Friday. Alas, it was Friday’s loss that bothered Brooklyn’s veterans more…
Claxton was still muttering to himself about the loss in the locker room postgame. Wednesday’s loss might have elucidated the effect that organizational tanking has on its players — and why you try to keep their duration short. But Friday’s loss showed that players are wholly divorced from that strategy. While clearly an optimal development for Brooklyn’s long-term prospects, especially with the New Orleans Pelicans and Indiana Pacers picking up wins on the same night, this one stung.
“We played a really good game,” said Clax. “I feel like we deserved to win. We just didn’t execute enough down the stretch, so we got to learn from it. But this is a tough loss though. This one really hurt.”
With the trade deadline 12 days away, both Claxton and Porter Jr. are sure to have a go bag packed at all times. But neither of them seem too concerned about the possibility of being traded.
“It seems like it’s the same thing every year, whether it’s — I mean, it’s a part of the business,” said Clax. “You see certain teammates, certain names in trade rumors or whatever, but you just got to be where your feet are and be a professional. It’s cliché, but it is what it is. It’s our job to come out here and perform whenever we put on a Brooklyn Nets uniform.”
MPJ. agreed: “Honestly, I’m just going with the flow. Whatever happens, happens. It’s out of my control. So, I’ve voiced already that I’m enjoying my time here, and I’m enjoying getting to grow with these guys and the day-to-day process with these guys. But everything else, I just try to let it be what it’s going to be.”
Brooklyn’s two highest-paid players have been pushed into early vet-status as a result of being on the NBA’s youngest team. This week, they were right for the part, easily shrugging a historic loss and trade rumors off their shoulders before leading one of Brooklyn’s most competitive games in 2026.
The Nets are 12-31, the worst team either player has been on — for MPJ, by a long shot. Now, they get to escape a brutal snowstorm in the Northeast by starting a five-game road trip in sunny Los Angeles. Once again, the task will be to rebound from a brutal loss; is it the same as rebounding from an outright embarrassment?
“No,” says Porter “It’s different. You learn from them in different ways. Obviously what happened at MSG the other night is unacceptable and there’s unlimited things to learn from. But tonight there’s very specific things, late-game situations. So you can learn something from any game.”
Nic Claxton simply sighed: “It’s so many games when you play an 82-game season. So, you really just can’t get too high, you can’t get too low. You get beat by 50, you got to be ready to respond. If you lose a tough game like this, you just kind of just got to be even-keeled through everything.”
While that is certainly a clichéd sentiment, the Nets just covered the entire bandwidth of defeat in three days, from Wednesday’s embarrassment to Friday’s gut-punch. In a losing season that only promises to continue down this path, that cliché may is a damn useful one.
