"At some point in the second quarter, Nets coach Avery Johnson went silent. There was little point anymore to all his usual exhortations, the play-calling or the work of the referees.

The game against the Detroit Pistons was slipping away, and Johnson was powerless to stop it. It was that kind of night — over early.

The Nets got MarShon Brooks back after the rookie guard missed six games with a broken pinkie toe on his right foot, but Brooks' return did nothing to help them avoid what was their ugliest loss of the season, a 109-92 beat-down from the Pistons.

"I got nothing for y'all tonight," point guard Deron Williams said afterward. "It's the same old story every game. It's kind of hard to really answer what went wrong.

"This was bad," he continued. "It was one of our worst ones of the season. Down 30 points — not much effort, not much fight. It was just one of those games where nothing can go right. We couldn't get our shots to go down. We got outrebounded. It just wasn't a good night for us."

The loss was the fifth straight for the Nets (8-20). And it's not like it came against the Bulls or the Heat, either. Lawrence Frank's surging Pistons may have won four in a row, but they, too, only have an 8-20 record. "