Another road date with Ja Morant, and Kenny Atkinson’s first trip to the Barclays Center as an opposing head coach mark the games added to Brooklyn’s calendar.
With Group Play of the Emirates NBA Cup complete, the league has released the remainder of the schedule for the “other” 22 teams, including the Brooklyn Nets, that didn’t advance to the Knockout Rounds.
The Nets will now be:
- visiting the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday, December 13 at 8:00 p.m. ET
- hosting the Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday, December 16 at 7:30 p.m. ET
As a reminder: In the In-Season Tournament era, NBA calendars initially have only 80 games scheduled for each team. Now that the results of Group Play are final — and Brooklyn’s 1-3 record doesn’t qualify them to advance — they and 21 other teams now get those missing two games on their docket.
(As for those teams that did advance, each of the first two knockout rounds count as regular-season games. Only the Cup Final, in Las Vegas, exists outside of regular-season play.)
The Nets, though, have been dealt an interesting hand this holiday season. After seemingly sweeping the regular-season series with the Memphis Grizzlies, they’ll face off with Ja Morant & Co. a third time. Alas, with an odd number of teams (11) from each conference getting eliminated after Group Play, there will be some of these schedule irregularities moving forward.
Brooklyn also picks up a home game against the 19-3 Cavaliers. Shockingly, the East’s best team did not advance, as two of their three losses on the season have come in NBA Cup play.
That game will mark Kenny Atkinson’s first visit to the Barclays Center as an opposing head coach, and Atkinson’s first year in Cleveland’s big chair could not be going much better. He was just named the Eastern Conference’ Coach of the Month, and frankly, it was no debate…
Houston Rockets head coach Ime Udoka and Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson have been named the NBA Western and Eastern Conference Coaches of the Month, respectively, for games played in October/November. pic.twitter.com/UcIctHIq3x
— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) December 3, 2024
Despite Atkinson’s past work in helping to elevate the Nets from a directionless go-between to a proud, winning team, he never won that award in nearly four seasons in Brooklyn.
After Cleveland escaped a furious Nets comeback with a win in early November, Atkinson said it was a “wonderful experience I had [in Brooklyn], but there’s always something, a little something extra when you’ve been with a team before. A little more awareness, a little more tension, a little more … you want it a little more.”
As for Jordi Fernández’s 2024-25 Nets, mid-December represents a much-needed reprieve in the schedule. From Wednesday, December 4 to Thursday, December 19, they play just five times, with multiple off-days between each game. That comes after a whirlwind stretch of games — including a West Coast trip — that has stuffed Brooklyn’s injury reports with half the roster on most nights.
Mid-December also marks the unofficial start of trade season, as the 15th is the first day on which the 80 players who signed new contracts this past offseason can be dealt. Under the new CBA, complicated multi-player, multi-team deals will be the order of the day and so the bigger the player pool, the better for GMs trying to get things done. The last NBA trade of any kind was the blockbuster between the Knicks and Timberwolves that saw the teams exchange Julius Randle for Karl-Anthony Towns on the first day of training camp.
Still, Brooklyn has some more pressing business to attend to, starting with this Wednesday’s home game against the Indiana Pacers, set to tip-off at 7:30 p.m. ET. The game preview can be found here.