Nets Cruise Past Hawks in London

By Sam Neter on January 17, 2014

Brooklyn Nets cruised past Atlanta Hawks, 127-110, at the O2 Arena on Thursday night, led by an inspired 26 point first half performance from Joe Johnson.

It means the Nets remain undefeated in London, improving to 3-0 as Johnson smoked his former team out, going 10/13 in the first half.

“We just exploited mismatches. I was just feeding off these guys,” Johnson said. “We had a lot of ball movement and took a lot of open shots.”

“We’ve got the best seat in the house,” Garnett said on taking in Johnson’s performances. “When you’re so used to being in that situation yourself, it’s great to have a guy who can just take over the game.”

One of the loudest cheers of the night came when Hawks guard Kyle Korver extended his NBA record to 108 straight games with a 3-pointer, aside from that, it was a rough outing for Atlanta, the designated home team.

Notes

Deputy Commissioner (soon to take over from Stern) said the NBA Regular season game in London will remain an annual thing, and also said they will “possibly do a tournament at some point”.
A ton of celebrities at the game, including hordes of footballers and Sir Paul McCartney.
Kevin Garnett received the biggest cheers/reception from the London crowd.
Stern also seems to have experienced the problems British basketball suffers from: “The infrastructure in countries other than the UK (the the NBA has played in) historically has been a little more focused with the support of a governmental body together with the federation, together with the league, and that hasn’t quite been the case with the UK.” Standard.
The Nets-Hawks encounter is the 12th NBA game in London, dating back to 1993, but only the fourth regular-season game (via the NBA).
Former NBA stars John Amaechi, Dominique Wilkins, Steve Smith and Dikembe Mutombo were the designated legends on the night.
Nice touch from the NBA to have an “NBA Players from the UK” board as you approach the O2, but as _hopie_24 points out – missing Rob Archibald!

Did you make it to the game? Thoughts?

Do you like our work?

We have a tiny favour to ask. In 2018 we set out to make Hoopsfix sustainable by building our relationship directly with our readers. Up until now, Hoopsfix has been creating editorials, videos and podcasts to provide sorely missing coverage of the British game and its distinct culture and community.

We have funded Hoopsfix with our freelance work creating basketball media, but sadly that means not only does it fall behind our client’s priorities, but some of those clients are the same organisations we need to report objectively on putting us in a conflicted position.

We want to devote more time to our mission of helping British basketball reach its potential, and produce even more content for the basketball community by making Hoopsfix a sustainable 100% independent business funded directly by our readers through Patreon.

If everyone who enjoys our content chose to support us, our future would be much more secure. For as little as $3 per month, you can support Hoopsfix – and it only takes a minute.

We are tremendously honoured and humbled to have a community of people who value what we do, and we look forward to being at the forefront of the British game as it continues to evolve.

Support Hoopsfix