A visibly frustrated Jimmy Butler is standing in front of his locker. His playoff-bound, star-studded Timberwolves just lost, 98-97, to a Nets team whose most recognizable, healthy face is DeMarre Carroll. Butler doesn’t know where his team’s energy was on Wednesday night, but he knows one thing for sure:
“You can’t take any team in this league lightly,” he conceded. “They came out, did what they wanted to do and got them a W.”
This has been the case much more often than last year for a Brooklyn Nets team that is exceeding expectations just three months into the regular season.
After winning just 20 games all of last year, Brooklyn is 15-23 for the 11th seed in the East. And that’s after their veteran leader, Jeremy Lin, ruptured his patella and called his season quits in Game 1 and after D’Angelo Russell underwent a minor knee surgery and has been sidelined since Nov. 11.
The Nets beat the Timberwolves on Wednesday without Caris LeVert, their two-way playmaker and usual first player off the bench, who was out with a groin injury. It marked yet another win against playoff teams that Brooklyn has no business beating... or do they?
“We wanna make another step, and it’s two things: It’s beating really good teams, especially at home here at the Barclays with the great crowd,” Kenny Atkinson said after Brooklyn’s win over Minnesota. “And then it’s our consistency, doing it a little more consistently over a long period of time.
“For a young group like ours, it was great togetherness for our group. I think it’s really going to help our confidence going forward.”
The Nets’ win over the Wolves isn’t their first upset of the season. Brooklyn has defeated Cleveland, Oklahoma City, and Washington — three teams with aspirations for deep postseason runs — as well as the Jazz and the Trail Blazers. The Nets also forced the Pacers to overtime and lost by only three to the first-place Celtics.
Brooklyn isn’t a .500 team yet, but it’s losing games by fewer points than last season. The Nets average margin of loss is -2.3, according to data from NBA.com, and that’s a drastic improvement from minus-6.7 last year and minus-7.4 in 2015-16.
