Nets at Rockets
The Brooklyn Nets have yet to secure their first win of the season and the path to that first victory is not immediately clear. The Nets will continue a four-game road trip and a stretch with eight of 10 away from home when they visit the Houston Rockets on Wednesday.
Brooklyn opened the trip with a 94-86 loss at Milwaukee on Saturday and finishes up with a back-to-back at Sacramento and Golden State on Friday and Saturday before a brief trip home to face Eastern Conference power Atlanta on Tuesday. The Nets have not scored 100 points since a 115-100 loss to the Chicago Bulls in the season opener and are the worst 3-point shooting team in the NBA at a paltry 23.6 percent. The Rockets are not much better at 31.9 percent from beyond the arc but are trending upward with four straight wins. Star guard James Harden got off to a rough start and is a big part of that poor 3-point percentage while shooting 24 percent on an average of 10.7 attempts, but he broke out of the slump with back-to-back 40-point outbursts and a 9-of-20 performance from beyond the arc in wins over Sacramento and the Los Angeles Clippers.
TV: 8 p.m. ET, YES (Brooklyn), ROOT (Houston)
ABOUT THE NETS (0-7): The poor start and the fact that Brooklyn’s first-round pick in next June’s draft will go to the Boston Celtics gives the team a grim outlook for the future. "I'm not sitting in here shirking accountability,” Nets general manager Billy King told ESPN.com. “... It stops at me. I'm the GM. You make decisions along the way, and it's my job now to figure it out and turn it around. ... It doesn't happen overnight.” Brooklyn seems to have dodged a serious injury to center Brook Lopez, who left Sunday’s game with a sore right foot but had X-rays come back negative.
ABOUT THE ROCKETS (4-3): Houston coach Kevin McHale is happy that his team is moving faster on the court, led by Harden, over the last four games. “He’s being aggressive. He’s playing faster,” McHale told reporters of Harden. “I thought our entire team played like we had cement boots on for three games. We were just slow. You watched the film, it looked like we were sickly or something. We were so slow it was ridiculous. You just can’t play that way.” Harden averaged 18 points in the first three games but bumped that number to 38.5 over the last four.
BUZZER BEATERS
1. Rockets C Dwight Howard totaled 43 points and 34 rebounds in his last two games.
2. Brooklyn G Joe Johnson is shooting 17.4 percent from 3-point range.
3. Houston took both meetings last season.