Sinking Ship…But Can They Trade Vince?

I don’t know if anybody else caught that Nets v. Philly game last night. Philly ended up pulling it out in OT at home, extending NJ’s loosing streak to 4 with another heart-breaking loss. Did I mention Vince missed a wide-open 25 foot look for the win? I was flipping back and forth between whatever other bad TV that was on at the time, until it got interesting. I settled in for the stretch run when Philly finally took the lead after being down for most of the game. With about 2:30 minutes left, I actually started to take note of where the NJ possessions were going, that is, who was taking their shots. It even sorta surprised me, since they did have two all-stars on the court…

Out of the 14 possessions NJ had in the last 7 and a half minutes of the game (the game, incidentally, went into overtime) Vince was directly involved in 12. For the math freaks, that’s every possession, except 2. It bears mentioning Kidd wasn’t even bringing up the ball for the majority of the time; they just went straight to Vince. He ended up being 2-7 from the floor during this span, but he had his shot blocked twice by Dalembert. He did manage to get to the line 4 times making half his free throws. And he also had 2 assists (notably, creating the Eddie House game tying 3), as the rest of the team went 2 for 4 down the stretch: one of the two Non-Vince misses was a wide open 18 foot look for Uncle Cliffy off a Vince feed.

Basically, barring an Uncle Cliffy miss from 3 that Vince had nothing to do with, the only non-Vince created play was an intentional Philly foul on Kidd to keep him from shooting the 3. To Ason’s credit (he was 5-16 for the night), he hit both free throws. Oh, and Kidd did create that wide open look to win the game for Vince on a play Philly almost deserved to lose on, for playing such terrible defense.

On an almost a side-note, Vince did play some good on-the-ball defense at the end of the game, doggedly staying in front of Philly’s primary scoring option, Iguodala, even blocking him once. This forced the 76ers to divert most of their offense through Andre Miller during the OT. However, off-the-ball was a different story, as VC did get used by the ‘other AI’ on a backdoor cut for an oop and left him criminally open for a back-breaking, 5^th period ‘3’ when he was caught in no-mans land, engaging in a half-assed double team of Miller in the post. The same ol’ facts of life with Vince: you take the good, you take the bad…

I guess you can see where I’m going with this. Vince was/is the Nets crunch time offense. Granted, maybe Kidd took himself out the game because he was shooting so poorly. But Kidd’s default play left Vince to not only create for himself, but gave him the responsibility to let the other Nets leach off his ability to get them shots (or had to settle for what he could give them…). Sadly, that made Eddie House the 2^nd most valuable Net on the offensive end and Uncle Cliffy the ‘next’ option. The rest of the Nets on the floor were cosmetic…that conspicuously includes the ‘other’ Net all-star.

Some changes definitely need to be made over in the Swamp. But can they really afford to trade Vince without getting a primary scorer back? And with Vince’s history, will any team really give up that player for Vince? Ah, the Vince quandary…can’t win with him…who the hell is gonna score without him. All I can say is, glad that’s not us…anymore.