Here’s How The Nets Have More Wins Than The Cavs In March

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The Brooklyn Nets are not a good basketball team. On the contrary, they’re a pretty dreadful basketball team. In fact, they’re the very worst team in the NBA, by a significant margin. Yet, they’ve managed to win more games so far this month than the Cleveland Cavaliers.

In the grand scheme of things, it obviously doesn’t amount to much. In a couple of weeks, the Cavs will finish either No. 1 or No. 2 in the East, while the Nets will have gone fishin’, or whatever it is people do for outdoor recreation in New York in the springtime.

The fact that they’ve won more games than the Cavs this month also obviously comes with the caveat that five of those six wins came against teams with a sub-.500 record that are well out of the playoff picture. Yet, Brooklyn deserves credit for racking up a full 2/3 of their total wins for the season here in the month of March.

Brook Lopez – who has clearly seen the writing on the wall – has reinvented himself this season even as his team has failed in every other pursuit. In March, Lopez is averaging 22.1 points and 5.8 rebounds per game while expanding his range, shooting 38.5% from three-point range this month. Lopez has been the driving force behind Brooklyn’s March surge, and if not for his game-winner against the Pistons on Tuesday, they’d be dead-even with the Cavs for wins this month.

But just how is that Cleveland has managed to play so poorly during this stretch? Well, they started the month off on the totally wrong foot. During the first week of March, they played four games in six nights – three of which were on the road – and they lost three of those contests.

They managed to find their footing again during another brutal string of four games in six nights recently, then (rightfully) opted to rest LeBron James and the rest of the Big Three in a loss against the Clippers. But if you dig a little deeper, the record shouldn’t be any surprise as they’re playing pretty much their worst basketball of the season.

Given the stretch-run doldrums, it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re playing at the slowest pace they’ve played at all season, but what’s more alarming is that their defense is the worst it’s been all year (and it’s been middling to bad the entire time) as they’re currently giving up 114 points per 100 possessions this month.

Some of this can attributed to all the lineup changes as the Cavs work injured players (Kevin Love, J.R. Smith) back into the rotation, but LeBron James has publicly ridiculed his team’s lack of toughness on the defensive end. With Boston nipping at their heels (the Celtics are just a game behind them), the Cavs are in real jeopardy of losing the No. 1 seed.

Yet it’s more than likely that the lethargic Cavs aren’t really worried about any of this. They’re much more concerned about being fresh and staying healthy for a long postseason ahead. They can use the first couple of rounds to tune up as they probably won’t face much of a challenge until the conference finals roll around. Right now, they’re just trying to get through the next few weeks in once piece, just like the rest of us.

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