The Nets are within the playoffs.
Now comes the hard part as they’re essentially done with the regular season, and are moving on to the 76ers.
They cruised to a 101-84 rout of Orlando before a sellout crowd of 18,177 at Barclays Center on Friday night to clinch the sixth spot within the Eastern Conference with a game to play.
The regular-season finale might be Sunday against Philadelphia, the identical team they’ll face in the primary round of the playoffs, starting next weekend.
Don’t expect any fireworks, or anything that resembles postseason passion.
That may come later.
The Nets got a game-high 22 points from Mikal Bridges, a Philadelphia native who was drafted by the Sixers (for which his mother worked) and promptly traded quarter-hour later on the 2018 NBA Draft.
Now he’ll head down the Turnpike, back home as an emerging star for the Nets.
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“It’s just the playoffs. It’s time to lock in and take it up one other notch regardless of who it’s,” Bridges said. “Obviously, I’m back home, I play in that gym loads. But I’ll have the identical energy, same aggressiveness regardless of what team we play. So, probably not [any extra]. I’m just form of going back home, so a whole lot of family and friends will give you the chance to make it, easier for them.”
The Nets technically clinched with 4 minutes to play on Friday, when the seventh-place Heat’s loss to the Wizards ended.
Now they are going to prepare for his or her playoff series with the 76ers, against whom the Nets are slowly constructing a rivalry.
“It lets us give attention to Philly and hone in on what’s next,” coach Jacque Vaughn said.
The mere mention of the 76ers is a reminder of a painful Nets failure: From their 1976 entrance into the NBA, which got here at the associated fee of selling Julius Erving to the Sixers for $3 million within the worst trade in team history (and considering the ill-advised 2013 Kevin Garnett-Paul Pierce deal, that’s a high bar), there’s history with Philadelphia.
And most of that history is negative.
The Nets’ have played 12 postseason games against the 76ers and lost eight of them.
There was the 2019 playoff defeat that got testy when Joel Embiid threw an elbow at Jarrett Allen, Jared Dudley went after the 76ers star and general manager Sean Marks stormed into the officials’ locker room.
The teams have the identical seeds this 12 months they’d in 2019, although Spencer Dinwiddie and Joe Harris are the lone Nets on the team this season who were on that upstart squad.
“We’re more established. That was a young team trying to seek out their way,” Dinwiddie said. “We now have a whole lot of guys who understand who we’re within the NBA already. We’re trying to seek out our way as a unit. That one was more so we had a whole lot of guys trying to seek out their way as individuals within the league.
“We had great vibes, a bunch of great character guys … but we still just were wide-eyed and didn’t necessarily know. You’ve got guys on this team who went to the Finals, conference finals, things of that nature, have experience, and have an appropriate respect for Philly obviously, but there’s no fear or anything.”
After that playoff appearance, Nets general manager Sean Marks assembled a supposed superteam by signing Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, then adding James Harden.
But last season, Harden forced his way out and engineered a trade to Philadelphia that brought Ben Simmons to the Nets.
Suffice it to say with Simmons’ injuries (he missed all of last season and was shut down again this season with a foul back), it hasn’t gone because the Nets had planned.
Simmons might be in street clothes when the Nets host the 76ers on Sunday within the low-stakes finale, and once they travel to Philadelphia next week for the games that count.
Forget the very fact they’ve lost three straight to the Sixers.
The Harden-Simmons subplot will add spice to what has the potential to be a rivalry.
“Definitely,” Dinwiddie said. “I feel we’d like a bit of more long-standing success as a rivalry to call Philly a real rival, but we now have had some iconic meetings after I was there. That they had a bit of beef; Nic [Claxton] and Embiid got into it, and Embiid had elbowed Jarrett, stuff like that. I’d say it’s too early.”
But not if the Nets can handle their business.