The Nets fought back from a three-games-to-one deficit against the Chicago Bulls to earn this opportunity, a win-or-go-home game in their new arena and another chance for their black-clad fans to shower this rebranded franchise with full-throated adoration.
They were confident because it was all right there, all on a platter, all for the taking. The Bulls' roster had been thinned by injury and illness. The Nets could surge into a second-round series with the top-seeded Miami Heat.
But it all crumbled to pieces in a first-half performance that, for the Nets, could not have been scripted any worse. The Bulls went on to win, 99-93, on Saturday night, closing the inaugural season at Barclays Center with an anticlimactic thud and cutting short the season of a team with designs on a deeper postseason run.
"When we won Game 6," Nets point guard Deron Williams said, "we felt like this was our series."
In front of a raucous capacity crowd — the first to watch a Game 7 in Brooklyn since the Dodgers hosted the Yankees in 1956 — the Nets shot 40.7 percent and fell behind by as many as 17 points in the first half. They closed the gap to 4 in the fourth quarter, but Chicago, which scored 52 points in the paint and had 19 offensive rebounds, managed to hold on.
The Bulls followed the energetic lead of their center, Joakim Noah, who had 24 points and 14 rebounds and blocked six shots. After the game, Noah, grinning broadly, leapt into the crowd to hug his mother, Cecilia Rodhe.
"I'm so proud of this team," he said. "All of these experiences I'll never take for granted."
In a dour and stunned Nets locker room, Williams tossed a crumbled score sheet to the floor. Joe Johnson, who shot 2 of 14 from the field and scored 6 points, barely whispered his explanation for what tied his lowest scoring output of the season.
"I was just out there trying to give the guys what I had," Johnson said. "It was tough not being able to come through."
The Nets entered Game 7 calm and confident, saying they believed that they were better than the Bulls — that they were better than the Bulls without the injuries and were certainly better than them now.
The bravado had some foundation. The Nets won 49 games this season, earning the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference with two of the N.B.A.'s highest-paid players, Williams and Johnson, and an All-Star center, Brook Lopez, at their core.
They also had a full roster at their disposal, unlike Chicago, which was missing the starters Kirk Hinrich (calf) and Luol Deng (illness) on Saturday, not to mention its franchise player, Derrick Rose, who has not played this season.
The Bulls got by mainly on heart and hustle, as well as the ingenuity of their coach, Tom Thibodeau, who was wringing a rolled-up statistics sheet in his hand for parts of the second half Saturday, looking the part of a mad scientist on the sidelines.
The Nets were undone by the same inconsistent swings that plagued them all season and all series. They made two field goals in the third quarter of Game 2. They missed 25 of 26 shots in the first half of Game 3. They shot 27 percent in the second half of Game 6.
On Saturday, they fell behind, 29-25, in the first quarter while relying on Williams, who scored or assisted on 15 of the team's first 20 points, to engineer the offense. Lopez was quiet, and Johnson struggled.
The Bulls built up their lead in the second quarter, taking a 17-point lead into halftime. The crowd booed.
"They played like they weren't ready for their season to end," forward Gerald Wallace said. "They ran what they wanted, and we were on the back of our heels."
After Game 6, Noah had sat at his locker and predicted the Bulls would win Game 7.
"We're going to go into a hostile environment in Brooklyn," Noah said, "and we're going to win."
It was a head-turning pronouncement. The Nets had won two straight, and the momentum was clearly in their favor. It tilted even further that way when Hinrich and Deng were announced out for Saturday's game. But that hardly mattered.
The Nets opened the second half firing, and after a 21-8 rally, the score was 69-65. Wallace was explosive, flying to the rim for several emphatic slams and scoring 11 of his 19 points in the third quarter. The crowd was back into the game.
The Nets trailed by 7, at 82-75, entering the fourth quarter, but they missed their first six shots and quickly fell behind by 10. A layup-and-one by Williams with 2 minutes 26 seconds left cut the lead to 5, 93-88.
It was 95-90 entering the final minute, and with 40 seconds left Johnson missed a 3-pointer from the corner. Fans began gathering their belongings. A 3-pointer by Williams offered a glimmer of hope, but the season ended on a missed 25-foot 3-point attempt by Johnson with nine seconds remaining.
The Nets and the Bulls hugged at midcourt after the buzzer. After seven hard-fought games, which included moments of rage, there was nothing left in either tank.
The Bulls were exhausted but victorious. The Nets were humbled and muted. In Game 7 on their home court, with all on the line, the Nets never led.
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