Nets: This is not who we are

Joe Johnson doesn't have any answers for you.

He doesn't know why the things the Nets do in practice don't translate to the court, or how the game against the Celtics got so out of hand. He didn't trot out that tired narrative that the Nets are better than the record shows. Not after Friday night.

"It shouldn't take this long to get under your skin," he said after the Nets' 120-95 loss in Boston. "We were 2-10 before the game, so I don't know . . . It's hard to get a win."

This is the stark reality that the Nets face -- one that was obscured by a fistful of tight losses to very good teams but painfully exposed in Friday night's blowout. It's possible that the 2-11 Nets are exactly as good as their record shows, and that's just hard to swallow.

"It was a bad game," Brook Lopez said. "We played to their strengths a lot . . . [Friday] was very disappointing."

Lopez talked about bouncing back, but that won't be easy. On Sunday, the Celtics will visit Brooklyn for a rematch, and they're taking a lot of baggage with them.

For one, the Celtics remind the Nets that things might not necessarily get better in the future. They have the Nets' unprotected first-round draft pick next year, can swap for first-round picks in 2017 and have their 2018 first-round pick, too.

Secondly, they remind them of failures long past. Not one of the four players traded for those draft picks still is on the Nets, and the main components, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, weren't enough to get them even close to a championship.

And finally, the freshest memory will be of Friday night, when the Celtics outscored the Nets 43-23 in the second quarter and scored 21 points on 20 turnovers in the Nets' harshest loss of the season.

"Defensively, we just played bad," Thaddeus Young said. "We played terrible defensively at every position, including myself."

Asked if there was anything to be gleaned from the loss, Young was momentarily stumped.

"I mean, we can take all the things that they did in this game and try to make sure to capitalize," he said. "But like I said, there's no excuse for how we played. We have to pick it up and bring it back to playing close games and getting at teams early."

In truth, some of their previous losses gave them hope. They took the unbeaten Golden State Warriors to overtime before losing by eight and had two-point losses against the Sacramento Kings and the Atlanta Hawks. But the way they lost Friday night was disheartening in a way that reverberated throughout the visitor's locker room at TD Center.

"I have no idea" why the things preached in practice aren't practiced on the court, Johnson said.

They did "things that Coach harps on us about in practice . . . offensively, taking bad shots; defensively, not helping one another, and we did all those things wrong and we're paying for it."

Lopez added that "this is not the team we are."

If not, the time has come to prove it.

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.