Ollie’s unit hardly resembled a team desperate for a victory with a spot in the Eastern Conference’s play-in tournament still within reach.
Instead, Brooklyn fell behind 33-16 after the opening quarter and trailed by as many as 19 points en route to its third loss in four games on this six-game road trip, which will continue Saturday night in Indiana.
“That’s a physical team,” Ollie added. “They just did a really good job of taking the physicality to us, and we just cannot allow a team to do that, especially a team that good.”
Banchero burned the Nets for 21 points and nine assists, distributing the ball quite ably and opening scoring lanes for his teammates, six of whom also scored in double figures.
The 6-foot-10 power forward missed one shot the entire night, going 6-of-6 from the floor and 8-of-9 at the charity stripe. He also grabbed three boards en route to finishing with a game-high plus-18 differential.
The Nets did pull within eight points early in the fourth quarter, but Orlando responded with a 19-8 burst, sparked by a high, arching 3-pointer from Joe Ingles that bounded off the rim, scraped the top of the backboard and fell through the twine.
“They just hit some tough shots, some lucky shots,” said Cam Thomas, who led Brooklyn with 21 points and eight rebounds. “But you just have to live with shots like that. It’s an 11-point lead at that point, so you just have to try to get the lead back down again.”
Banchero added a pair of free throws and drained a step-back 17-footer during the spurt to stretch the advantage to 107-93 with less than five minutes to play, extinguishing any hope of a Brooklyn comeback.
“I give a lot of credit to Paolo,” Magic center Wendell Carter Jr. told the Associated Press.
“I’ve seen him kind of set the tone for everyone else before,…
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