Nets are Easts final winless team as season takes concerning turn with loss to Pistons

Coming off their best effort of the season, the Nets cratered with their worst offensive showing of the year. Brooklyn got smothered 110-94 by the visiting Pistons before a sellout crowd of 17,548 at Barclays Center on Friday night. It came on the heels of a 125-124 overtime heartbreaker in Boston, when they led for much of the night in TD Garden and looked cohesive and competitive.They were neither against visiting Detroit. The defeat didn’t just keep the Nets winless at 0-5.

In their first NBA Cup tilt of the season — where point differential is the second tiebreaker, right after head-to-head — it put them behind the eight ball already in Group A, against Toronto, Orlando and Milwaukee. And certainly against these Pistons, who gave them a caning. “Yeah, a lot of physicality, ball pressure.We have to handle that offensively, taking care of the ball, being spaced properly, our setups and so forth,” Nets coach Jordi Fernández had warned beforehand.

“Getting back in transition, they’re playing fast and starting with Cade [Cunningham], throwing the ball ahead and pushing, and then him in pick-and-roll and scoring in different ways.Three-level scorer, super player, very well-coached team, team that plays extremely hard. “It’s physical, like I said.

So it’s a good challenge for us.I think all these games that are coming, you would think, ‘Oh, we have a lot of playing against top teams.’ And I think that’s the best thing for us because it’s pushing us to get the best of ourselves.

And we saw it in Boston.I think that we competed at a good level.

I think we can still be better.But if we have the same level of intensity and we show a connected group, I think we’ll be completely fine.” The Nets weren’t any kind of fine. Brooklyn shot just 40.3 percent overall and 11 of 37 from 3-point range, committing almost two dozen turnovers. The Nets actually played feisty defense at times, holding the Pistons to 42.2 percent and 12-for-...