Devin Harris

[blessednegr0]

Dont get me wrong. I really love Kidd. But anyone see his game against Sacramento today?

[dude1394]

Originally Posted by blessednegr0

Dont get me wrong. I really love Kidd. But anyone see his game against Sacramento today?

There's already a devin harris love fest thread. I saw the box...looked pretty pedestrian.

Edit: He must have had a nice 4th...he was lagging the last time I looked. Good win for them..it looked pretty nip and tuck.

[Kidd Karma]

Big time 4th, back and forth. VC and Devin are big game players, they know when it counts.

[basketballgirl25]

that game made me so nervous. When VC went out I thought we would have lost glad I was wrong though

[eweig]

Nov. 30: Nets 117 Suns 109

Devin Harris:

47 points
8 assists
7 rebounds
1 steal

Now, I love Kidd in Dallas, but dang I also miss Devin. But then again, he does have Carter that he can dish to and the guy knows how to finish. We don't have that in Big D.

Ernie
http://www.irvingweekly.com

[GermanDunk]

Yes, with 47 points he even made it to german newspapers.

[Underdog]

D-M.com?

How about D-H.com?



(I swear what we needed was another f*cking thread about Devin Harris!)

[FINtastic]

I was thinking we could just devote a subforum to Devin Harris.

[horse900703]

I really want harris back

[Flacolaco]

I bet whoever made that signature really wants it back too.

[MavsX]

dammit flaco

[ty]

DAIIAS MAVERICKS

[Benny]

I wonder where the Nets will stay at the end of this season. Devin Harris really seems to start clicking with that team. Of course, one could say, it's just been a few games thus far, but he really looks aggressive and effective out there.

I guess it's been said many times already in the forum here, but I also miss Devin really much. But then again, if he's doing great with the Nets, it don't mean he'd be doing as good with the Mavs. Different teams, different situations.

It's kinda like that breakup-situation I am in right now, personally. You can't do nothing but just wish the best and move on. Obviously, Devin moved on, question is when will we... Hypothetical question of course, but staying in the "I miss Devin" mode won't help the Mavs team or us fans.

That's just my two cents... normally I don't ever post anything here but rather keep reading. I read this forum for a couple of years now and think twice before I post.

[MavsX]

what is devin's contract status? When is he a FA? Maybe dallas can re-sign him knowing that kidd's hip is about to break

[Benny]

Independent of his contract, I don't think NJ would ever let him go. I mean, why would they? Apparently he's a huge help for the team. And if Devin would actually want back to Dallas, now that he's become a real important part of this team? Hmm...

[dude1394]

Must be tough on Devin to go from such a winning team to what he's with now. I expect this season will really test his resolve.
http://www.nj.com/nets/index.ssf/201...tensity_l.html

PHOENIX – He settled into his hotel room here and flipped on the TV during the third quarter of the Dallas-Boston game on TNT, and Devin Harris admits he was struck by a strange feeling.

Envy, maybe? Perhaps it was just nostalgia. Or even melancholy.

It was a routine midseason matchup – two really nice teams that both think they can get to June, slamming away at each other before Dirk Nowitzki grabbed the game by the throat and put it away midway through the fourth period, with Jason Terry applying daggers when it was his turn.

And the Nets point guard asked himself this question: Why can’t my team even approach the level of intensity that my old friends are showing on national TV tonight?

“I’ve been a part of that. It helps when you have Dirk Nowitzki shooting” 14-for-22, Harris said Tuesday, forcing a chuckle. “But just the way they play defensively, and push the ball and share the ball on the break, things of that sort. You relish that. You try to instill it in the guys, but. . . .I don’t know.”

A pause. A shake of the head.

[sefant77]

Harris gives a s*** this year about playing defense, maybe he should start back playing some d...

[fluid.forty.one]

Originally Posted by Flacolaco

I bet whoever made that signature really wants it back too.

Horse is a photoshop genius. He's like Rainman.

[Flacolaco]

Originally Posted by fluid.forty.one

Horse is a photoshop genius. He's like Rainman.

And he was a retárd.

[quietsavant]

Take it with a grain of salt but according to a podcast by Ric Bucher via ESPN, Lakers inquired about availability of Devin Harris. Most likely looking to replace Fisher if its true.

http://www.hoopsworld.com/Story.asp?story_id=15048

[quietsavant]

Marc Stein ESPN

The Nets’ willingness to move point guard Devin Harris has been a popular topic since our own Chad Ford included Harris – even with visions of Harris' 2008-09 breakout season still so fresh – on ESPN.com’s list of 25 prime trade candidates before the league’s Feb. 18 deadline.

Chad subsequently mentioned a possible Harris-for-Caron Butler scenario in a SportsNation chat earlier this week, which was followed by ESPN The Magazine’s Ric Bucher reporting on the NBA Today podcast with Ryen Russillo that the Lakers have inquired about Harris because of concerns about their ability to contain quicker guards defensively.

One source close to the situation, however, cautioned Wednesday night that the Nets do prefer to keep Harris for the rest of this season – specifically through the draft lottery in May at a minimum – before dealing him.

The Nets still regard second-year center Brook Lopez as their only untouchable and are undeniably somewhat dismayed that Harris hasn’t been able to follow up last season’s All-Star appearance with a next-step season.

The Nets, though, also concede that it would be far easier to shop Harris if they know they’ve just won the right to draft Kentucky’s John Wall with the No. 1 overall pick. If they don’t win the Wall lottery, with no other impact point guards forecasted to be available in the draft or through free agency, dealing Harris based on what they’ve seen during this nightmare season might prove to be a hasty call.

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/pos...ris-trade-talk

[Big Boy Laroux]

Forget Devin Harris, I want Humphries back!

Sick dunk on Kaman last night, 25 points, too. And yes, i know it's easy to put up numbers on a bad team. But still, it's the NBA.

[Thespiralgoeson]

How Nets went from bad to ugly
PER Diem: Feb. 4, 2010
Comment Email Print Share
By John Hollinger
ESPN.com

With just four wins through 48 games, the Nets are on course for the worst record in NBA history.

I've held off on this story for half a season because I expected regression to the mean to kick in and make this a nonissue. But it never happened, and now we have to acknowledge the reality: There's a very real chance the Nets will finish with the worst record in NBA history.

The Playoff Odds also showed hope that it wouldn't get this bad for the Nets. Even during New Jersey's record-setting 0-18 start, the algorithm figured the team would get its act together and finish with a win total in the teens. Slowly, however, a projection of 16 wins became 14, then 12, then 10. As of Thursday, that prediction is now down to nine.

If the Nets do finish with nine wins, it would tie them with the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers for the worst NBA record ever. Based on its current record (4-44), New Jersey is on pace to finish with just eight victories and claim the record for itself.

Worst NBA Teams Ever

Find out how the Nets stack up with the '72-73 Sixers in the chase for the worst record ever.
Worst Teams Ever

Moreover, despite how badly they started the season, the Nets seem to be getting worse rather than better: New Jersey went from losing close games under Lawrence Frank to getting blown to smithereens in more recent games under general manager and interim coach Kiki Vandeweghe, and a recent stretch of winnable games against fellow bottom-feeders like Washington and Philadelphia bore little fruit.

New Jersey's Power Ranking is an abysmal 87.1, suggesting the Nets would be a 13-point underdog against an average team on a neutral floor. Not only is the Nets' record impossibly bad, its average margin of victory, minus-11.7, has actually worsened to minus-12.9 in the most recent quarter of the schedule.

While the Nets can point to a few close games that got away from them, in reality, they have the point differential of a nine-win team. In other words, they're getting what they've earned. Ready for the punch line? They've played the league's eighth-easiest schedule thus far, an amazing feat when one considers they're the only team that doesn't get to play the Nets.

The incredible part is that the Nets weren't supposed to be nearly this bad. Virtually every other truly awful team in history has either known darned well they'd be horrible before the season or been so bushwhacked by injuries that no sane person could have predicted a different outcome.

This case feels different. The Nets went into the season with two strong core players in Devin Harris and Brook Lopez; some young pieces in the likes of Courtney Lee, Chris Douglas-Roberts, Yi Jianlian and first-round pick Terrence Williams; and a few solid veterans in Rafer Alston and Keyon Dooling. That's not a playoff team, but it's not a team we'd expect to lose 60 games either … much less 73.

So what happened? How could a team with All-Star caliber production from the center spot and a former All-Star at the point manage to become so unrelentingly awful?

The reasons are myriad, and any one of them wouldn't be nearly enough to make the team record-setting bad. As in any case when a new worst record is set, it's not possible without a unique set of circumstances combined with some serious bad luck. This one is no different:

Devin Harris regressed physically and emotionally
A year ago at Geekapalooza, I debated with Mavericks owner Mark Cuban about trading Harris for Jason Kidd. I have a feeling the tenor of that conversation would shift dramatically if we were to have it today. Harris hasn't been himself physically, missing 15 games and competing at half-strength in several others, and that's a huge reason his numbers are down (37.7 percent shooting, 15.26 PER).

However, it's not the only one. Sources told me Harris and Frank weren't feeling each other, and that Harris -- one of the league's best perimeter defenders in Dallas -- essentially stopped playing defense once he became The Man in New Jersey. Harris is certainly still capable of being a dynamic scorer, and he's not the only asset New Jersey acquired in the Kidd trade -- they unloaded Kidd's then-maximum salary, grabbed a since-traded Ryan Anderson with a first-round pick two years ago, and have the Mavs' first-round pick this year. Still, at this point, Harris' season has to be considered a crushing disappointment.

They traded their stars too late
The Nets clung to the remnants of their two-time Eastern Conference champions too long rather than start the rebuilding process, which is why the current edition is so painful to watch. New Jersey got Harris for Kidd; a year earlier they might have been able to get Andrew Bynum. They waited until Richard Jefferson was on the downside of his career before sending him to Milwaukee for the least-productive starting forward combo in memory, Yi Jianlian and Bobby Simmons. Ditto for Vince Carter, who went to Orlando in a deal that returned only Lee (a decent rotation player), Tony Battie and Alston, who was later waived and signed by Miami. Not a terrible haul, but hardly the pieces they could have had a year earlier.

They misjudged young talent
The Nets are justifiably proud of their 2008 draft, in which they took Lopez with the 10th pick, snagged Anderson 21st and grabbed a keeper in Chris Douglas-Roberts in the second round. Other than that, though, their past few drafts have been unmitigated disasters. The fact that Terrence Williams, Josh Boone, and Sean Williams haven't been able to crack the rotation for what is perhaps the worst team in history is about as damning an assessment as you could produce for the Nets' talent evaluation. Although Sean Williams was let go in January, at least that trio made the roster to start the season. Marcus Williams, Antoine Wright and Zoran Planinic, three former Nets first-rounders, are long gone. Other than Lopez, the last Nets rookie to be a real factor for NJ was 2002 first-rounder Nenad Krstic, who now plays for Oklahoma City.

They also whiffed on Yi, trading Jefferson for him in hopes of netting a big star and instead watching his progress come to a screeching halt. His birth certificate is one issue -- most suspect he's two or three years older than his listed birth date -- but his lack of feel for the game is perhaps a greater impediment. "He's a robot," said one league talent evaluator of Yi's mechanical offensive approach, and his grand total of 18 assists on the season does little to counter that notion. Assistant coach Del Harris, who worked with Yi on the Chinese national team in 2004, was brought on midway through the season to help in his development. But Harris recently left the team without making much headway.

They have no home court
New Jersey might have the least impressive home-court advantage in basketball. While a few other arenas have basically been glorified mausoleums this season, none can match New Jersey's dismal combination of negatives. This club had trouble drawing even when it was good. Now, it's simply terrible. Moreover, the Nets are likely leaving their puny fan base behind for Brooklyn at some undetermined point in the future (and perhaps Newark in the interim), limiting locals' incentive to keep the faith. (Take it from me: As a native Jersey boy growing up on the good side of the Hudson, Brooklyn might as well have been Beijing.) It's kind of like the Sonics' situation two years ago, except with a quarter of the fans and no Kevin Durant.

They have no money
The problems with the home court have exacerbated another issue with the Nets: their general lack of money. As owner Bruce Ratner's Brooklyn development project turned into a money pit, the Nets' accountants turned into Edward Scissorhands. New Jersey cut assistant coaches, cut scouts, fired their statistical analyst (oh, how that wounds me) and started hitchhiking to road games. OK, that last one isn't true. But all the others are. At first, the Nets could paper over some of the gaps. But if you pull out enough nails, eventually the whole house crumbles.

That problem worsened this year with the firing of Frank. The Nets didn't want to pay another coach, so they kicked GM Vandeweghe downstairs to do it, even though he had no real coaching experience and most observers didn't regard him as a strong coaching candidate: "The ultimate tanking strategy," said one source. It's tough to be too harsh on Vandeweghe given what he's been asked to work with; whoever got the gig was basically being asked to squeeze blood from a turnip. That said, one has to wonder if a more experienced hand might have the Nets performing more competently.

The veterans were worse than they had any right to expect
The most obvious example comes at the Nets' most problematic position, small forward. OK, they knew they weren't getting LeBron James when they traded for Bobby Simmons, but this? They at least thought they could get a PER in the low double figures from Simmons and Jarvis Hayes. However, the duo is barely hitting that mark combined.

Their Orlando refugee relocation program hasn't gone well, either. Alston was the starting point guard for the Eastern Conference champions a season ago; in New Jersey, he played 27 games and shot 34.3 percent with a career-low assist-turnover rate. Battie was supposed to be a useful fourth big man. Instead, he's also shooting 34.3 percent and posting a PER of 6.55. Lee missed eight games with an injury and hasn't been any better than he was as a rookie in Orlando, scoring at virtually the same rate with a much lower true shooting percentage. And Keyon Dooling, who was traded to New Jersey in 2008, was one of the league's most reliable third guards until this season, when his 10.65 PER and 39.5 percent shooting have only added to the Nets' offensive malaise.

And then there's Eduardo Najera. I bring him up because he symbolizes the Nets' disastrous personnel decisions: a declining, undersized veteran with bad knees who was clearly on the way out. Still, New Jersey inexplicably signed him to a four-year, $14 million deal in the summer of 2008. It was one the Nets' few recent forays into the free-agent market, but a team that's cutting money like New Jersey can't afford to make mistakes like this. They finally pawned him off on Dallas in January and took on money to add Kris Humphries, who has been among the few recent bright spots for New Jersey.

All told, it took an amazing confluence of events for the Nets to reach this point. They've made bad decisions at almost every turn and had misfortune with injuries, and aside from Lopez virtually every player has performed worse than expected.

Sum it all up and you get a team that one has to give at least a 50-50 chance to tie or break the mark for the worst record ever. While future events could alter that picture -- a trade for Amare Stoudemire, for instance, would presumably get them into double-digit victories -- New Jersey's plight is serious. It's amazing that the Nets could go off the rails this fast after they won a respectable 34 games last season, but all the signs were there. Throw in a confluence of injuries, bad luck and off years, and they have a real shot at making history for all the wrong reasons.

http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/insid...PERDiem-100204

Just thought this was relevant.

[EricaLubarsky]

They are on pace to win 6.8 (7) games and not 8 games. No matter what, that is utter disaster territory.