--The third quarter was murderous early in the season for the Nets. And it is doing them in again. In their last nine games -- eight of them losses including Friday's road defeat in Atlanta -- the Nets have been outscored by better than eight points per in the third quarter. The ghastly numbers show the Nets being outscored, 250-176, in those nine games. Friday, while the Nets also faltered in the fourth quarter, the game got away in the third. In the final 5:24 of the third quarter, the Nets were outscored, 16-6, going from a one-point lead to a nine-point deficit.
"The thing with the third quarter, we were able to get in the bonus early, and then we didn't get as many paint attacks as we needed and their aggressiveness started to turn on," coach Lawrence Frank said. "We had a hard time in transition defense, a hard time with our pick and roll defense, getting split." --G Chris Douglas-Roberts and assistant coach Doug Overton got into an argument at practice Thursday with Overton loudly admonishing the rookie. It seems Douglas-Roberts was complaining about a lack of foul calls in a scrimmage and Overton yelled at him to just play. Head coach Lawrence Frank downplayed the incident.
"It's over," Frank said. "Things happen. That's part of the deal. The adage we have, and I use it all the time, is: 'What is coaching?' Coaching is getting players to do what they don't want to do to become the players they want to become. It's not all going to be ice cream sundaes and pecan pie. It is no incident. Doug, he's helped Chris in so many ways. That's part of learning the professionalism of being a rookie and how you conduct yourself."
QUOTE TO NOTE: "You never get tired of going. But I'm not going to go crazy over it. If you get the bid you get the bid, if you don't you don't. I don't go overboard with it. I'll watch like everybody else. I'd love to be on, I wanted to play. But it didn't happen." -- G Vince Carter, an eight-time All-Star, on not being voted onto the All-Star team.
