


The Nets aren’t tanking, and almost certainly aren’t tearing it down.
That means they’d better be competing and fighting. And doing a better job of both than they have over the past two weeks, having their worst skid of the year during their biggest games of the season.
“We have to have competitive stamina,” interim coach Kevin Ollie admitted. “I talked to them about that: How’s your stamina? Not just your wind, I mean just from a competitive standpoint. That has to be there every single minute for us to win, and it wasn’t [lately].
“When somebody hits you, you just don’t lay down, you hit ’em back.”
With the size-starved Nets, physicality doesn’t mean matching strengths pound-for-pound. It means cutting backdoor, making crisp passes, protecting the ball.
And competitive stamina doesn’t mean running on the treadmill or doing mile repeats at altitude. It means mental toughness to play good team basketball even in a pressurized fourth quarter, something they haven’t done.
Or to play winning basketball down the stretch. Something they haven’t even come close to doing.
Their competitive gas tank seems to be running on empty. For a team that is neither tanking nor rebuilding from scratch, that’s worrisome.
“It’s just the stamina to keep doing it for the whole 48. I think that’s what it is, just the concentration and the mental aspect of just staying with it,” Mikal Bridges said before Monday’s game in Toronto. “I guess we’ve all been struggling with it, and [now] is a good night to start it now.
“I think it takes everybody, and playing the whole 48 minutes, just having a concentration, everybody just being locked-in for the whole 48, no matter what the score is, if we’re up or down just staying the course the whole time.”
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The Nets were mired in a season-worst six-game losing skid going into Monday’s tilt. They’re 11-30 since Dec. 27, the sixth-worst record in the league.
“Yeah, but I mean, you can’t complain about it. You can’t say ‘I wish we could have done this and that.’ You’re in it right now. So you’re present right now,” Bridges said. “So obviously it sucks that we’re here right now with that situation. But all you can do is you’ve just got to go up from here.”
But as Nets fans know all too well, things don’t necessarily go up. And they can always go even further down.
The thing is, Brooklyn shouldn’t be this bad.
The Nets could easily have chosen to tear this team down to the studs, but The Post reported that they would refuse an offer of several of their own natural first-round picks back from Houston in return for Bridges.

Both The Athletic and Yahoo! have reported that they have rejected a package from the Rockets that would have included young piece Jalen Green.
That implies this roster is going to look at least somewhat the same at the start of next season. That means these players need to show some pride in fighting to the finish.
“We gotta learn something, everybody,” Nic Claxton said. “We all just have to look ourselves in the mirror, figure out ways to be better.”
And the thing is, they still have a chance to get something out of this horrible campaign.
Yes, their Tragic Number — the combinations of Nets losses and Hawks wins that would eliminate Brooklyn from the Eastern Conference Play-In — was only seven coming into Monday. But Toronto was on a 10-game losing skid and an injury-riddled shell of itself, missing RJ Barrett, Immanuel Quickley, Scottie Barnes and Jontay Porter.
That starts the third-easiest schedule down the stretch for the Nets, per Tankathon.
And a year ago at this time they were mired in a five-game losing skid before thrashing Miami, 129-100. They proceeded to close by winning six of their last nine.
That roster looked similar to the current one. But this one has to prove it still has some competitive stamina left.