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 from nine to 7.5 percent.
It’s why Tuesday’s game is so important.
“We’ve got to have a short-term memory,” center Nic Claxton said. “You know, it’s the NBA. We go play Portland next, so we’ve just got to try and get that win and stay positive.
“We’ve been losing a lot, and everybody’s tired of losing. … We’ve just got to be better all around.”
This is the part of the season when a tank can become trying. It can grate on the players trying to win, weigh on the coaches trying to build a positive culture.
Just look at each team’s past nine contests. The Trail Blazers have won four times while Brooklyn has won only once. And they’re set to be without leading scorer Cam Thomas and Trendon Watford, and possibly without Johnson and D’Angelo Russell as well.
“I think it’s an opportunity. And the NBA gives you a lot of opportunities in different ways,” coach Jordi Fernandez said. “I always tell the guys that playing late in the game, whether you’re up or you’re down, it’s a good opportunity. If let’s say you’re up 20, you want to finish up 30. If you’re down 30, you want to finish down 20. And you want to see those guys fight and compete in those moments.
“Games like [these], there’s guys out. You may have minutes, you may have more shots. Is that going to happen in the future? You don’t know. But you can control just what you can control. So right now, we have guys out. Somebody’s got to take minutes. Somebody’s got to take shots. Somebody’s got to play the defense. Somebody’s got to pass the ball.
“So all those things are important. Somebody has to bring the group together like Cam Johnson does. He’s not playing now, so who’s going to do it? Those things are important for us.”
