Digging into Nets blatant tanking with players goal still to show up and compete

PORTLAND — The Nets are keeping their eyes on the prize. It’s just that the players’ day-to-day prize is a different one than the front office’s big-picture reward down the road. The Nets may be tanking — OK, Brooklyn is tanking — but rest assured their players and coaches are trying to win.They’re fighting for every victory. But dragging a season-worst five-game losing skid into Tuesday night’s game at lottery-rival Portland, they haven’t fought quite hard enough. “We’ve got to compete,” Ben Simmons said of the Trail Blazers game.

“We can’t go in there — I know this is kind of like a rebuild situation, but we’ve got to go in there like we want to win regardless of what the front office is expecting. “We’ve got to [fight].That’s just personally.

I want to win, and compete.The same as the coaches.

So, we’ve gotta show up and compete.” The Nets competed in a 112-111 overtime loss at Utah on Sunday night.They scored the final six points of regulation to force the extra stanza, and led before giving up the winning drive with 6.4 seconds left. Before the game, injured veteran Cam Johnson was in the locker room trying to boost spirits, telling his teammates he was confident they were going to start a winning streak.

And after the defeat, players were commiserating about how one failure to commit the foul they had to give proved costly. “I think it’s details,” Simmons said.“To win a game is hard in the NBA.

So you got to be detailed, and consistent.It’s got to be all four quarters.

You can’t just show up when you want.” The Nets enter Tuesday’s game just 13-26, with the sixth-worst record in the NBA — or, the sixth-best odds of winning the lottery.They’re clinging to a slim half-game edge on the Trail Blazers, sitting seventh in the lottery standings. The difference between sixth and seventh sees a team’s odds of a top-4 pick fall from 37.2 percent to 32.0 percent, or the top overall pick drop...