NEW YORK — The Brooklyn Nets have been looking to players like third-year guard Cam Thomas to stop the team from having so many stretches where scoring is hard to come by. It seems that slow starts are becoming one of the themes for the Nets at this point of the season.
“Probably say how we start,” Thomas said when asked what has he seen as a common theme between Monday’s 96-95 loss to the Miami Heat in overtime and Thursday’s loss in Paris to the Cleveland Cavaliers. He put up 23 points and three assists in 32 minutes off the bench against the Heat, similar to what he had to do to help Brooklyn come back from a large deficit against the Cavaliers.
“In Paris, we started the game slow so that’s what we was playing from,” Thomas explained. Against Cleveland, the Nets were down by as many as 26 points whereas in Monday’s loss to Miami, Brooklyn led by as many as 16 points. As Thomas pointed out, the Nets lost both of those winnable games thanks to a slow start either at the beginning of the game and at the beginning of the second half.
After Brooklyn went into halftime leading 45-31, Miami won the third quarter 37-24, essentially getting back into the game in an instant and snatching the momentum from the Nets in a furious fashion. Thomas could not think of anything else going wrong for the Nets at the moment other than those slow starts. “Probably say the way we start quarters. I probably say the first and third quarter so that’s probably the main thing to it, but it is what it is,” Thomas said.
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