It’s only appropriate that it has come to this.
The Brooklyn Nets needs to win tonight at Barclays Center to keep its weird, roller-coaster season on the rails — and by roller-coaster, I’m talking the Cyclone at Coney Island, the sort of thing that seems held together by tape and rubber bands.
And in order for the Nets to win, the team needs the most inscrutable player in perhaps the entire NBA to decide whether he’s going to play like the All-Star he used to be, or the barely relevant player he appears to be becoming. I’m talking, of course, about Deron Williams.
In games two and three, D-Will looked about as effective as the rabble of hammered pigeons I saw struggling to stay upright in the rafters in Atlanta’s Philips Arena (those Southerners really take to the moonshine — my old bird liver is as pickled as a Ba-Tampte cuke from years of finishing off discarded cups of overpriced stadium suds, but I couldn’t keep up with those boozefowls). Practically every bird in the flock fell off the beam at one point or another, but instinct and experience kicked in and they kept flapping back up there.
And sure enough, in game four, D-Will came to, steadying himself with a huge 35-point performance that included seven three-pointers. The Nets pulled even in the series, and all of a sudden it felt like Brooklyn was on the cusp of pulling off the biggest upset of the first round.
Then Wednesday came, and Mr. Williams dropped a whopping five points in 32 minutes. There has to be something historically significant about a human being making $20 million a year to play basketball and making just two shots during an entire half-hour on the court. The stat sheet says D-Will only had two turnovers, but I lost track of many times he barreled into the lane, head down, without a clue as to what he was going to do when he got there. It reminded me of the time my cousin Sandy and I made the bird-brained decision to ride on the very front of the Cyclone when we were young chicks — we could tell halfway down the first drop we were going to be propelled beak-first into the pavement before we could fly off, but it was too late to back out, so we just squaked our little lungs out until we crash-landed in the dirt.
And that’s the rub with today’s D-Will. As a fan, it’s encouraging to see him attacking the basket and making defenses react. But increasingly, that aggression feels like a futile effort — whether it’s nagging injuries or just a regression in his ability, he no longer seems like a threat around the rim. We want to see a 35-point breakout as a glimmer of hope, but the reality is he just happened to get hot from beyond the arc on Monday. If his shot isn’t falling on a given night, he’s as hopeless as a pigeon trying to order at a drive-through.
So let’s hope our big ol’ point guard has another big-time performance up his sleeve tonight. If not, I’ll be drowning my sorrows in whatever bathtub swill those Atlanta birds bring up here.
By the way, all this talk of Coney Island’s got me craving some Nathan’s, can you drop a couple of those cheese fries on the ground? I don’t mind a bit of sand — adds texture.
