Jason Collins will finish the season with the Nets. (USATSI)
After two 10-day contracts since the trade deadline, the Brooklyn Nets will retain the services of backup center Jason Collins some more. The team announced Saturday they've signed Collins for the remainder of the 2013-14 season. From the Nets:
The Brooklyn Nets have signed center Jason Collins for the remainder of the season, General Manager Billy King announced today.
Collins has appeared in eight games for the Nets this season, since signing with the team on February 27. He's played a total of 78 minutes, while grabbing six rebounds and six steals. He's scored five points on seven shots, while providing solid low post defense in his time on the court. He's been thrown in there to mix it up on defense, and he's been very consistent in using his allotted fouls when he's out there. His per 36-minute average of 8.3 fouls is the fifth highest in the NBA.
His signing goes beyond basketball as the story has been told many times since his signing. Collins came out last spring as the first openly gay active NBA player in league history.
Basketball Hot News
Thunder to rest Russell Westbrook on certain back-to-back sets to finish the season
The Thunder currently hold a record of 48-17, a game back of the Spurs for the best overall mark in the league.
Finishing the year on top of that race would guarantee home court advantage throughout the playoffs and into the Finals should OKC make it that far, and it’s a goal most teams would kill to have a shot of reaching at this late stage of the season.
But keeping the big picture in mind, the Thunder aren’t planning on going all out to get there.
With a high volume of back-to-back sets the rest of the way, the team is more concerned with preserving its stars for a postseason run, which means willingly taking Russell Westbrook out of the lineup for a handful of games the rest of the way.
From Randy Renner of NBA.com:
The Oklahoma City Thunder’s closing schedule is heavy with back-to-back sets, six of them over the last month of the season, and Thunder head coach Scott Brooks on Saturday said once again that point guard Russell Westbrook will not play in both games of “some” of those sets.
“We have a plan in place” as to which games Westbrook will sit , said Brooks, but he wouldn’t reveal it Saturday after practice.”I’ll let you know at the appropriate time,” he added. …
“We had a plan in place early on when we brought him back and we wanna stick with that,” Brooks said. “We just wanna, while we can, get some time where he can rest in between games.”
There’s been no word of Westbrook experiencing any swelling or discomfort in his surgically-repaired knee, so this appears to be an overly-cautious maneuver by Brooks and the team’s medical staff.
The Thunder play back-to-backs sets over their next four games, the first of which comes at home against Dallas on Sunday and then on the road in Chicago the very next night. The killer set comes on April 3 and 4, at home against the Spurs followed by a road trip in Houston.
We’ll see what the standings look like when each of these games approaches to see if things change, but it appears as though Brooks has already made up his mind.
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