There’s losing, and there’s rolling over.
This was the latter.
The Nets opened the second half of the season by taking a 112-84 thrashing at the hands of the Cavaliers before 19,432 in Cleveland on Thursday night.
They trailed by as many as 43 points in a game that was never moderately competitive.
It was the Nets’ eighth wire-to-wire loss.
No other team has more than five.
The worst part about this beating was they never bothered to fight back: no board work, no getting back in transition, no defensive resistance.
It was a rout so comprehensive, the Nets (15-39) couldn’t pick out a single thing that could’ve turned it.
“Everything: physicality, intensity, all those things that we didn’t match.
And they were obviously way better than us,” coach Jordi Fernández admitted.
“Like I said, their physicality, their intensity was as it should be for a winning team. So we were not even close.”
Carved up by former Nets star James Harden (16 points, nine assists) and by Donovan Mitchell (game-high 17 points), the visitors had no defensive discipline.
They gave the Cavs whatever they wanted, allowing 64.3 percent shooting in the first half.
The Nets hit just 34.5 percent on the night and 28.6 percent from deep.
They were led by Michael Porter Jr.’s modest 14 points on just 1-of-6 from 3.
Newcomer Ochai Agbaji added 13.
It was one-sided, with the Nets down 101-59 after ex-Nets guard Dennis Schröder’s free throws with 1:09 left in the third.
The silver lining was it helped the Nets’ tanking efforts.
They moved into a tie for fourth in the lottery standings, pulling even with Washington, just one game out of second — both Indiana and New Orleans are 15-41 — and two ahead of Utah.
They were flat from the start.
Going down 4-0, Fernández immediately called a timeout.
It didn’t help as he watched his team let Evan Mobley — in his first game back after missing seven straight with a calf injury — run right down the lane for a dunk.
The Nets allowed the first eight points and let the Cavs hit their first six shots.
Down by nine, they conceded an 11-2 run to double that deficit.
That deficit swelled to 43.
“It was two mistakes that were completely controllable, and it just tells me about the readiness of our players. It was the lack of effort and readiness, and I’m not going to let it fly. And didn’t wake up,” Fernández said.
“We know we’re better, our standards are much higher than this. Now we’ve got to move on to the next one, and hold everybody accountable — myself included — and go and fight better [Friday in Oklahoma City].”