Mavericks at Nets
The season has been a lost cause for the Brooklyn Nets for the last few months, but that doesn't mean the players have stopped putting in effort. The Nets will try to pick up their third win in the last five games when they host the stumbling Dallas Mavericks on Sunday.
Brooklyn owns the worst record in the NBA and is only team in the Eastern Conference officially eliminated from postseason contention but is playing its best basketball of the season of late with two wins over the crosstown rival New York Knicks and a tight 98-95 loss to the Boston Celtics on Friday. "I thought we did a good job executing," Nets coach Kenny Atkinson told reporters after Friday's setback. "Credit to them, they hit some big shots down at the end ... but the positive I take is that we're learning to play when shots aren't falling for us. That's important. In the first half, we couldn't throw it in the ocean, but we kept defending, kept defending." The Mavericks are moving in the opposite direction and suffered another huge hit in their quest to challenge for the No. 8 spot in the West when they barely put up a fight in a 116-74 loss at Philadelphia on Friday. "This was by far the worst of the year in terms of energy, effort, togetherness, and we all own it," Dallas coach Rick Carlisle told reporters. "There’s not a lot to say. We got outplayed in every way possible. ... We just didn’t show up."
TV: Noon ET, FSN Southwest (Dallas), YES (Brooklyn)
ABOUT THE MAVERICKS (29-39): Dallas had some real momentum with six wins in seven games bridging February and March but has since dropped three of four to fall four games back of the eighth-place Denver Nuggets entering play on Saturday. The worst of the three losses came Friday, when the Mavericks shot 34.5 percent from the field. "We just didn’t have it on either end," Dallas star forward Dirk Nowitzki told the team's website. "It's pretty embarrassing. We just got beat in every area of the game. We were just awful. Give them credit. They threw a hard game at us, and they were making some shots. They hit us in some lolls where our weak side just wasn't in. I mean, they just hit us in every facet of the game."
ABOUT THE NETS (13-55): Brooklyn led the Mavericks in the fourth quarter at Dallas on March 10 without star center Brook Lopez before falling off the pace late and suffering a 105-96 setback. Lopez returned from an ankle injury in the Nets' next game and is averaging 24.3 points in the last four contests while going 12-of-24 from 3-point range. Lopez missed a tying 3-point attempt in the final seconds on Friday but finished with 23 points, five rebounds, four assists and a pair of blocks in a well-rounded effort.
BUZZER BEATERS
1. Nets PF Trevor Booker (leg) and SG Sean Kilpatrick (hamstring) are both day-to-day.
2. Dallas SG Wesley Matthews is 5-of-30 from the field in his last four games, including 2-of-18 from 3-point range.
3. Brooklyn SG Randy Foye scored in double figures in each of the last three games after scoring 10 or more only twice in the previous 19 contests.