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CLEVELAND — This isn’t the first time the Nets looked to Julius Randle to be a floor raiser.
With their overt tanking over, Brooklyn traded for the soon-to-be-32-year-old forward this summer in hopes of being more competitive.
But sources told The Post that the Nets nearly brought Randle in years earlier, back in 2019.
Armed with an ocean of cap space that summer and intent on big-game hunting, general manager Sean Marks landed Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.
But had Durant not been sold on becoming Brooklyn’s franchise player, sources told The Post that they would have invested in a still up-and-coming Randle.
In the end, Randle got traded from New Orleans to the Knicks, where he actually hit his prime. He spent five years in the Garden and making all three of his All-Star berths, turning them from a lottery team into a playoff contender.
Now years later, he’s trying to do the same thing on the Brooklyn side of the East River as a grizzled veteran instead of a young riser.
Randle had 23 points, six rebounds and five assists in Saturday’s nail-biting loss at Cleveland. He joined James Harden as the only Nets with 20-5-5 in consecutive games to start the season.
“We just got to stay positive and connected as a group. Adversities are going to happen, there’s going to be bumps and bruises. But the last thing we can do as a team is separate,” Randle said. “So we just got stay connected, positive as a group. Find the positives in the game of how we can build on that. And just continue to go from there.”
Egor Dëmin and Mikel Brown Jr. finally got on the floor together, logging four minutes in the fourth quarter. They were a plus-5 and sparked a 14-2 run.
Brown is on a minutes limit that has kept him from starting.
Asked if he had seen enough to at least deploy the together within the constraints of that minutes limit, coach Jordi Fernández was noncommittal.
“If you’re coaching thinking you want to play certain guys together, it’s when usually you’re doing it for the wrong reasons,” Fernández said. “A lot of times you have to coach the game feeling the game. Obviously you have a preparation — you look at their matchups, their sub patterns, yours, your lineups — and you have an ideal way of how you want the game to go. But then when the game goes, there’s fouls, there’s guys that play better or worse. Then you have to start coaching the game, and see who can guard this guy or all these things. Then the game flows.”
“Mikel had a good moment of making a couple of shots. He was vocal. He felt like he was giving his energy. I had the starting group on the bench, then that’s when I felt like it was a good moment to play together. Did I plan it? No. But a lot of times it’s how basketball is, right? We have all this preparation, the coaches do a great job putting all these pages and film and so forth. But then at the end of the day, you have to react to a lot of things that are not controllable in the game.”