What a wild ride this Brooklyn season has been. The expectations were low. In early December, Paul George single handedly overcame a 20 point 4th quarter deficit to rip the Nets’ hearts out and drop them to 8-18 on the year. The game capped an early season 8 game losing streak. None of it was unforeseen, as the assumption was this was just year 5 million of the rebuild. Brooklyn finally owned its own first round pick for the first time this decade. Maybe another season of tons of losing wasn’t such a bad idea.

Then everything changed. The Nets ripped off a 7 game winning streak and managed 9 victories in their next 10 games overall. By late January, they had clawed their way to 4 games above .500, hitting 28-24. They were the hottest teams in the league.

From December 7th to January 25th, Brooklyn tied for the most wins and best record over that time over that time span. They were a media darling. D’Angelo Russell looked like a whole new player. The Nets looked like a whole different team. NBA writers could not stop producing Brooklyn related content.

Since that day reality has set it. The Nets have fallen back to the middle of the pack from January 26th to now. This rollercoaster, along with the 2016-17 Miami Heat, are good exhibits as to how the true talent level of a team is the whole picture, not one of two different streaks.

Performance Indicators

Brooklyn doesn’t show well in any team metric, which has been the case all season. They’re 19th in point differential. Depending on if you like NBA.com or Basketball-Reference, they are either 17th or 16th in net rating, respectively. Either way, their net rating is a negative number. They rank 20th in Basketball-References SRS metric. Lastly, they’re 23rd in fivethirtyeight’s ELO ratings, and have hovered around that spot all season.

What are They Good at?

We recently detailed the Nets’ strengths, and it was a short list. The way we develop team strengths and weaknesses is by using our player grading system to show where each roster around the league is strong or weak within the 11 categories that we grade, and list the rankings in percentiles.

While they rank in high percentiles for guard one on one play, guard perimeter shooting, and wing interior defense, those are super specific areas and basically the only parts of the game where the roster excels.

After these three areas, Brooklyn’s next biggest strength is off-ball movement, and their percentile rank for the category is the 45th percentile. After that they come in in the 42nd percentile for big (as a position) interior defense.

The one area where they want to be exceptional, three-point shooting, they’re middling. The team is 4th in the league in 3PAr, but they’re only 17th in accuracy.

Close Games

The one thing they are good at, if this even counts, is finding themselves in close games. On the year, the Nets have found themselves in 41 clutch games, tied for the 4th most such games in the league. In those games they are 23-18, a top 10 winning percentage.

They also have a plus/minus of 0.2 in clutch minutes. Brooklyn is only 2.5 games up on the 9 seed in the East, and a bad bounce or terrible whistle here and there could easily have them on the outside looking in right now.

In fact, considering their negative point differential on the season, the Nets 38-36 record is two games better than their expected outcome, as their pythagorean expected win-loss record is 36-38. Swing those two games the other way and they’re only a half game up on Orlando for the 8 seed.

Reality

Brooklyn has come back to earth after a media frenzy. I guess it was somewhat justified. After a half decade of hopelessness, the Nets had their best ~25 game stretch in who knows how long. It was exciting. Russell and Dinwiddie were exploding. Jarrett Allen was ending up on both the glamour and business end of many posters.

Nets basketball was cool again, but they were always punching above their weight. They’ve settled back in to a middling team propped up by an inferior conference. Their odds of getting to the postseason are high, which is also exciting.

Enjoying the ride is justified, but let’s keep things in proper perspective.