Nets searching for wins during stretch of home games

The Nets are in a home-heavy stretch of games, playing four in a row, seven of eight and 13 of 17 on their Barclays Center court. So this is an opportunity to stay firmly in play for the playoff race.

Or as Kenny Atkinson put it after practice Tuesday at the HSS Training Center, “I think it’s important we make some money with all these home games coming up.”

They need to pick up the pace starting Wednesday night against Utah because they aren’t exactly off to a money-making start.

The Nets dropped the first home game Friday to Minnesota, 112-102, then turned over a 13-point, fourth-quarter lead Sunday to Philadelphia and lost, 127-125, on Jimmy Butler’s last-second three. That left them at 8-13 with three straight losses overall. They’re just 3-6 at home, including 1-5 this month.

“Yeah, it’s tough,” Joe Harris said of the 0-2 start, “because you look at the schedule; we have a nice, little homestand finally. We definitely need to do a better job of securing our home court. We haven’t done as good as I think we all would’ve expected coming into it. Usually, we play excellent at home, and I’m not saying that we haven’t. We have played well. We just lost a couple of tough ones.

“But you look at the schedule going forward and I think we have reasons to be optimistic.

We’re definitely trending upwards. And you definitely have the advantage of just being at home.”

That advantage may not mean much if they don’t solve two big issues, both on the defensive end.

Take the Philly game. The 76ers attempted 33 free throws and made 20; the Nets attempted 20 and made 15.

“If you look at it, man, we foul a lot,” Rondae Hollis-Jefferson said. “So figuring out how to limit the fouls, it comes down to mental, man, staying focused, being locked in, not fouling shooters, not jumping on pump fakes and stuff like that.”

Atkinson said teams are also “getting to the rim too much" and a lack of defensive rebounding may be the culprit. 

“We do a great job obviously of preventing threes and limiting teams to shooting a lower percentage . . ." Harris said. “But you’ve got to be able to finish off good defensive possessions with rebounding, and we’re towards the bottom in all the defensive rebounding categories.”

Harris said they did some more work on rebounding Tuesday.

“I told the guys I haven’t been a good rebounding coach,” Atkinson said. “I have to do a better job, to find a better way of helping our guys get the boards."

The Nets have lost three games by three points or fewer. But don’t expect a hangover from the latest one that they could’ve won.

“There’s too many games for you to dwell on a bad loss,” Harris said. “Obviously, we took a look at it and tried to learn from some of the mistakes that we had, just so we can be better going forward.”

Mitchell back from injury. The Jazz (9-12) announced that Donovan Mitchell will be available. The second-year guard, who's averaging a team-high 20.6 points, missed the last two games with a rib contusion.