The glue guy
Nets’ Russell stuck to bench late in games
For the second straight game — and the fourth time in just nine contests this young season — D’Angelo Russell was benched in crunch time, planted on the bench by Nets coach Kenny Atkinson.
Is the elephant in the room a message or just matchup management? “It’s game-to-game,” Atkinson said. “We’re going to see it with Spencer [Dinwiddie] and Caris [LeVert] and Joe [Harris], and they were playing well. And then we [started] switching everything, so didn’t want to get any mismatches.”
Russell is a porous defender, part of why both Byron Scott and Luke Walton benched him at times in fourth quarters with the Lakers. Now Atkinson didn’t use him a single second in the final period of Friday’s loss to Houston.
But Russell has played well in the fourth quarter this season, so it begs the questions of what’s going on with the guard as the Nets are set to host the 76ers on Sunday.
“D’Angelo has finished 90 percent of our games,” Atkinson said. “It was one of those games we felt that was the group, we felt as a staff, to go forward with. That was the group that was playing well.”
To be accurate, it’s more like 55 percent than 90. And that’s glaring.
Russell also sat out the last 5:42 of regulation and the entire overtime Wednesday against Detroit. He logged just 1:31 in the fourth quarter on Oct. 24 in Cleveland, and never got off the bench in the fourth quarter of the season opener.
But after claiming during camp that he wanted tough love from Atkinson, Russell has said the right things and not chafed now that he’s getting it.
“What he told you guys is what it is. I haven’t really talked to him about it, I haven’t asked him. It is what it is,” Russell said. “It’s hard to tell. I’ll look at the game film, see what I can do early in the game to dictate if I’m playing in the end. But we have a lot of guys who are capable of doing a lot of things, so whatever Kenny says goes.”
Russell is hardly the only player Atkinson has benched lately. Every starter other than LeVert has sat all or essentially all of a fourth quarter.
In the home opener against the Knicks, Harris logged just 47 seconds in the fourth, and Jared Dudley didn’t play at all in the fourth of the next game at Indiana on Oct. 20. Rondae HollisJefferson sat the entire fourth quarters against the Pelicans and Warriors. And in the past three games, Jarrett Allen sat out the whole fourth against the Knicks, fouled out before OT against Detroit and logged just 1:22 against the Rockets on Friday.
Part of the issue is getting Russell on court with Dinwiddie and LeVert, when they’ve struggled as a trio.
“You’ve got to remember that’s something we don’t ever practice. So it’s going to take time,” Dinwiddie told The Post. “In the summer you had Caris on the gray team ... and [the starters] on the black team. As training camp rolled around, Caris was on the black team and obviously I was still on the gray team.
“We never really played all three together consistently at any point in time. It’s just something we’ve done in games when coach feels like that’s our best option, so it’s going to take time to get to get that familiarity, that place where OK, boom, he’s going to do this, we’re going to do this.”