When the 14th-year vet makes a point of calling out his teammates, then, it's noteworthy. And when those teammates are employed by a Brooklyn Nets squad that has raced out to a 4-2 record — the East's fifth-best mark and just 1 1/2 games behind the Atlantic Division-leading Toronto Raptors — it's especially eyebrow-raising.
After reviewing the film from the Nets' Sunday win over the Orlando Magic, Johnson — apparently more frustrated than he's been at any point since being traded to Brooklyn a couple of years back — made no bones about his displeasure with the status quo, according to Devin Kharpertian of The Brooklyn Game:
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“It’s just — as individuals, as players, (we have to) have each other’s backs out there,” Johnson vented to the media after the team’s Tuesday afternoon practice. “I just felt, I didn’t believe it. I go back, and I watch the tape, and I watch film just to try to get a different perspective, and I mean, my feelings haven’t changed.”
“It’s just kind of what it is. Defensively, we help from time to time, offensively, I just think guys kind of exhaust their options and then when there’s nothing else for them, then they’ll pass it when they have to. For the most part, we’ve been very selfish.”
Johnson's Tuesday comments echo the angst he shared with reporters after beating the Magic, according to Tim Bontemps of the New York Post:
“I just think we get to a point where we get a bit complacent, the ball stops moving, guys get a little selfish and it makes it hard,” Johnson said after scoring 13 points in 32 minutes during the 104-96 win. “It makes it hard, because it breaks us defensively.
“It shouldn’t even come down to the last three or four minutes of the game. It was a tight game, and Coach [Lionel Hollins] had to make a decision to put me at the four, and it shouldn’t have come to that.”
After finishing up interviews, Johnson tweeted, “I’m off this [expletive]!!” — his first tweet in more than four months.
While Johnson's still fuming about what he saw as failures in ball movement, first-year Nets head coach Lionel Hollins isn't sure what all the fuss is about, and doesn't seem to be paying it much mind.
“[The Nets' players are] grown men, and they’re entitled to their opinion. I don’t have to agree or disagree — I don’t care what they say,” Hollins said, according to Howie Kussoy of the Post. “I thought our ball movement was really good. I thought our offense was really good.”
It is, admittedly, a little funny to hear a player whose predilection toward taking it himself for Mike Woodson's Hawks earned him the nickname "Iso-Joe" deride unnamed teammates for looking for their own offense first and foremost. A quick look at the numbers, though, suggests that despite their record, the Nets haven't been among the league's elite when it comes to moving the ball.
Through the season's first two weeks, according to NBA.com's stat tool and the SportVU player tracking data, the Nets' passing marks fall somewhere between mediocre and poor. They're middle-of-the-pack in points created by direct assist per 48 minutes (15th among 30 NBA teams), points created by assist per game and assists per 100 possessions (16th in both). They're slightly lower in assists per game, "assist opportunities" per game (passes where, if the shooter made it, an assist would be logged) and assist-to-turnover ratio (18th in all three). And they're just 25th of 30 in total passes per game as logged by SportVU, which captures stuff like inbounds and handoffs rather than just specific passes in the offensive frontcourt.
That said, though, direct assist numbers by themselves don't necessarily prove whether an offense is or isn't working. (It's worth noting that Brooklyn ranks second in the NBA in in secondary, or "hockey," assists per game — the pass that leads to the pass that leads to the bucket — behind only the Golden State Warriors.) And it's not as if the Nets' attack has been mired in the doldrums in the early going; they also rank second in the league behind the go-go Dallas Mavericks in offensive efficiency, scoring a whopping 109.5 points per 100 possessions through six games, and trail only the Dubs in both effective field goal percentage, which accounts for 3-pointers being worth more than 2-pointers, and true shooting percentage, which accounts for accuracy on 2s, 3s and free throws.
Five Nets are averaging double-figure points per game, led by Johnson's 19.8 per contest, and after undergoing surgery on both his ankles this offseason and entering the campaign knowing many NBA observers had written him off, Deron Williams has exploded out of the gate to the tune of 19.5 points and seven assists per game en route to his first Conference Player of the Week nod since leaving Salt Lake City. The only rotation piece canning fewer than 47 percent of his shots is Kevin Garnett, in whose minutes Brooklyn's still outscoring opponents by 4.5 points per 100 possessions.
The ball might not be whipping around the hardwood like it has been in Miami or like we expect it to in San Antonio and Cleveland, but the Nets sure seem to be doing a good job of depositing it in the round thing when they try to. That's got to count for something, right?
Only if Brooklyn can keep doing it against a better class of competition than a half-dozen opponents — the game-but-rebuilding Boston Celtics, the scuffling Detroit Pistons, the Durant- and Westbrook-less Oklahoma City Thunder, the game-but-rebuilding Minnesota Timberwolves, the shape-shifting New York Knicks and the game-but-rebuilding Orlando Magic — that have rung up a combined 13-28 record, according to Johnson.
More from Kharpertian:
“I’m not hiding anything,” Johnson vented after the team’s practice Tuesday. “We’re 4-2 six games into the season, but it’s early. We haven’t played anybody, and the Minnesota game (is) obviously a game we should’ve won. I thought this last game that we played against Orlando was almost a carbon copy.” [...]
“It’s a thin line between all of this, winning and losing,” Johnson said.
With the Nets heading west for a three-game road trip against a trio of teams — the Phoenix Suns, the Warriors and the Portland Trail Blazers — that have gone a combined 13-7 thus far, Brooklyn's margin for error figures to get even thinner. Late-November matchups looming with the likes of the Miami Heat, San Antonio Spurs and Chicago Bulls won't make things any easier.
But having piped up like this won't necessarily make things any easier on Johnson, either. Now that he's called his as-yet-still-anonymous teammates on the carpet for selfish offensive play that short-circuits the Nets' defense, we'll be looking a little harder at every Johnson touch, every face-up and back-down, every time he tries to take his man one-on-one when maybe reversing the ball might have opened up a cleaner look. That's the price of taking a public stand rather than simply going with the flow like Johnson so often has in the past.
To his credit, he seems to understand that the spotlight on him's going to get a little brighter, and perhaps a bit more uncomfortable.
“I don’t really say much. If I’m speaking on something or saying something, then obviously it has to be something,” Johnson said, according to Kussoy. “So I’m not just talking for my health. I’m doing it or trying to do it for the betterment of the team."
Whether Johnson's suddenly vocal leadership actually will serve the Nets' interests on their upcoming road trip, however, remains to be seen.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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