With Wednesday’s game on the line at Barclays Center, Charlotte went after the Nets’ 20-year-old rookie.
The contest was tied at 132 with 25.6 seconds remaining in the second overtime. Hornets wing Malik Monk dribbled the clock down, confident he could get by Brooklyn’s Rodions Kurucs, who was playing with five fouls, at any time in an isolation starting at the top of the key.
Monk attempted a crossover with about eight seconds left, but he mishandled the ball. Nets’ wing Joe Harris scooped it up and raced down the court, converting the game-winning layup with 1.7 seconds remaining.
“Rodi was in great position,” Harris said. “He was being active, applying a little bit of pressure. I was pretty attached, it wasn’t like I was playing excellent help defense. I just happened to see the ball rolling and I was the first person to anticipate where it was going.”
When Monk’s subsequent desperation heave misfired, Brooklyn had its ninth win in ten games to surge within a half-game of the seventh and eighth seeds in the Eastern Conference playoff picture.
“I think young guys, they lunge or make a false step (in that situation),” Nets coach Kenny Atkinson said. “He was just like one of those fencers—like a perfect fencer’s stance—and did a great job keeping (Monk) in front. (Kurucs) can do that with his length. He can be off you and still his arms are long enough to guard you. I think when players are playing against him, they’re surprised at his length.”
So much about Kurucs’ ascension this season is surprising. Selected 40th overall in June’s NBA Draft after barely playing—allegedly out of organizational spite—in Barcelona last season, Kurucs has become a fixture in Atkinson’s rotation and has started the last seven games following a right knee injury to Allen Crabbe.
The last time Kurucs was a DNP-CD was on December 5 in the Nets’ gut-wrenching loss to the Thunder, their eighth in a row. Again, they’ve gone 9-1 since.
Coincidence?
It’s too early to certify the cause-and-effect, but it’s clear Kurucs has fit into the Nets’ schemes perfectly.
“(Kurucs) is a great balance to that roster,” Hornets coach James Borrego said prior to the game. “He provides some defense, some length, some athleticism on the wing. He plays so hard. He really doesn’t need a ton of touches, doesn’t need the ball in his hands, so he really balances the rest of the group out there. I think his energy, his length and his defense, that’s really given (the Nets) a jolt right now.”
Kurucs’ raw numbers as a starter (12.9 points, 6 rebounds, 1.4 assists, 0.7 steals, 0.7 blocks) don’t jump out, but he has been very efficient. The Latvian is shooting 53/40/90 from the floor, three-point range, and foul line respectively.
He has to be shooting well, since he’s rarely involved in the offense. He gets his points off transitions, put-backs, timely cuts to the basket, kick out threes, and hard drives when a defender attempts to close out on those kick out threes.
What surprises me as much as anything is that none of Kurucs’ career-high 39 minutes on Wednesday were at power forward, the position I figured would suit him best given his six-foot nine frame. Instead, Atkinson has been more likely to put Kurucs on superstar guards like Indiana’s Victor Oladipo, Phoenix’s Devin Booker, or Charlotte’s Kemba Walker, rather than having him guard traditional power forwards. He had a big-time block when Hornets point guard Tony Parker tried taking him to the hole late in the first overtime.
“We had no idea, quite honestly,” Atkinson said in his pregame address as to how he knew Kurucs was ready for such assignments. “The thinking is we kind of gave him a little taste and it seems the more we give him, he steps up to the plate. He’s not fearful. Being 6-foot-9, as fast as he is and agile as he is, he’s able to play those guys. He makes some mistakes, but I’m just shocked there’s not more of them—there’s not a big list of mistakes. He’s pretty solid—you can trust him. He can guard one-through-four so far from what we’ve seen.”
I still think Kurucs’ future in Brooklyn will be as a stretch four off the bench, but, for now, the Nets have found lightning in a bottle no matter where they put him.
In a similar vein, give Atkinson credit for another adjustment to help save Wednesday’s game.
Walker was torching Brooklyn with his shooting and his handling. The UConn alum had 32 points through four quarters.
Atkinson had seen enough, so late in the fourth quarter, he unveiled a box-and-one, a defense usually played at lower levels.
The Nets showed a traditional two-three zone look until Walker made his initial pass. Then Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie face-guarded Walker to deny a return pass while the other four Nets played “zone principles,” without incurring a defensive three-second call.
After some initial fourth-quarter hiccups (nine Charlotte points in three possessions) using the box-and-one hybrid, the Nets held the Hornets to 15 points in their final 15 possessions, as charted by Jack Lichtenstein. In the regulation possessions where the Nets played straight man-to-man, the Hornets averaged nearly 1.14 points per possession.
“We didn’t even know what we were in sometimes in the timeouts,” Atkinson said. “It morphed into different things as the game went on. One thing we knew, we didn’t want Kemba to beat us.”
Walker grew frustrated, misfiring on two contested three-pointers before converting an and-one with 1:49 remaining, his only points in the extra sessions.
According to Dinwiddie, the strategy wasn’t part of the original game plan.
“We started to hedge the pick-and-roll a little bit, Kemba would step behind the hedge, hit a couple of threes,” Dinwiddie said. “We just decided to be flexible—switch up our defense completely. It was something we really didn’t talk about, but it was effective for us and kind of froze him a little bit and allowed us to get just enough stops to be able to win.”