Mikal Bridges couldn’t help but smile, something that has been missing for the past few weeks.
The Nets star scored 38 points on 14-of-26 field goals and 5-of-10 3-pointers in his team’s 114-102 win over the Hawks on Saturday afternoon at Barclays Center. I just mentioned. — after defeating the Hawks in the first of two straight games between the teams on Thursday — now within two games of the East’s No. 10 seed and the final play-in spot.
It followed one of the worst slumps of Bridges’ career, lingering shooting issues and the Nets’ overall struggles.
In the 10 games leading up to the two-game set against the Hawks, Bridges averaged just 16.9 points, shooting a dismal 39.5 percent from the field and 29.1 percent from behind. The Nets went 2-8 during that stretch.
Bridges’ shot then took a little step forward in Thursday’s win, scoring 15 points on 6-of-14 shooting from the field and 3-of-9 from behind the arc to break through on Saturday.
He can thank the Hawks for making it easy on him and letting him find his groove again.
On Thursday, the Hawks primarily trapped Bridges in screens with double teams, forcing the ball out of his hands and preventing him from finding open shots off the dribble.
But as a result, the Nets’ secondary scorers were able to find enough open 3-point shots, and they ended up blowing up the Hawks.
So the Hawks switched to drop coverage (where the screener’s defender drops behind the screener instead of stepping forward toward the ball handler) on Saturday, aiming to eliminate many of the kickout 3-pointers. .
But it was exactly what Bridges wanted, and what he struggled to find.
And he ate a feast.
“The last three or four games have been a lot of blitzes and stuff, so we’re always on our toes and preparing,” Bridges said after Saturday’s win. “But they were playing a drop and I was like, ‘OK, I like that.’ They did that, and I was just trying to find it and make the right play. . But yeah, obviously, as a player who likes to score goals, I made a change the other day about getting blitzed and not being blitzed. It was good.”
Against drop coverage, Bridges was able to manipulate more space, especially in the midrange. It also gave him much more time to read the defense and get open looks.
Bridges was also helped by the Nets’ much improved ball movement over the past two games.
Dennis Schroder, who played in just nine games with the Nets after being acquired from the Raptors before the trade deadline, is responsible for much of that ball movement and has drawn praise from his teammates as he adjusts to the new system.
Instead of trying to score on his own, which often allows opponents to double-team him, Bridges often received the ball on the move on Saturday, allowing him to attack defenders who were off balance and scrambled. Ta.
And, on a less specific note, interim head coach Kevin O’Ree believes Bridges ultimately took the game into his own hands instead of forcing shots.
“When you forget about yourself, you find yourself. That’s what I tell him,” Olly said. “When I say, ‘Sometimes you have to forget about yourself, Mikal, it’s not about you,’ and he understands that, and that’s when you can find yourself. He got hooked on playing defense and then all the offense came to him. I always want my team to understand that. Just getting lost on the defensive side. , the offense is going to come. The ball is going to find a hot player, and that’s what we did. We’re sharing the basketball now. It’s not very entrenched, so we’re going to keep it that way. I think so.”
Bridges’ struggles have amplified the debate over his ability to be the primary scorer on a playoff-bound team and whether he is truly a star at that level.
That certainly didn’t permeate the Nets’ locker room.
“There’s no chatter,” Cam Johnson said of Bridges. “All that stuff is background noise. He’s a professional. He comes to games every day, he doesn’t miss practice, he doesn’t miss games, and people want to say something about it or say something about a few missed shots. …That didn’t bother him. He went out there and did what he had to do.”
