How’d they do that?

Despite an off-season fire sale, the loss of Richard Jefferson to injury, and the total inability of any secondary player to find the basket, the Nets appear headed for the playoffs after yesterday’s win over the Philadelphia 76ers. Just as shocking is that the Nets have managed to reach the .500 mark, a feat that seemed hopelessly unattainable as recently as a month ago.

Consider this: At the All-Star break, the Cleveland Cavaliers were 30-20 while the Nets were 23-29. Since then, New Jersey has managed to make up eight games in the standings to draw even with Cleveland. The Nets now have the upper hand in the chase for the East’s final playoff spot because they own the tiebreaker with Cleveland, based on their 3-1 advantage in head-to-head meetings.

As a result, Cleveland needs to finish a game ahead of the Nets in the standings to keep New Jersey out of the playoffs. The way the two teams are headed, that seems highly unlikely. Cleveland’s loss to Detroit yesterday was its fourth in a row and 10th in 15 games since the questionable firing of Paul Silas. Meanwhile, the Nets are 13-4 in their past 17 games.

Cleveland does have a slight advantage with the schedule. The Cavs’ final two games are at home against Boston and on the road against Toronto. Both contests appear winnable, especially the finale against a disinterested Raptors team. New Jersey, meanwhile, has a home game against playoff-bound Washington and then plays the Celtics on the road.

New Jersey also could catch the 76ers for the no. 7 seed, but those odds are more remote. Philadelphia leads New Jersey by only one game and, like Cleveland, loses the tiebreaker to New Jersey thanks to yesterday’s 104-83 pasting by the Nets. However, the Sixers’ last two games are home against Milwaukee and Atlanta, teams with 11 road wins combined this year. In other words, any reality-based scoreboard watching should be confined to the Cavs.

Of course, the Nets have to take care of their own business first, and both Washington and Boston are difficult opponents. But it hasn’t seemed to matter who they play recently. I’ve harped on the Nets’ unusually poor point differential all season, because the law of averages normally catches up to teams with that big a gap between point differential and wins. The reason it hasn’t for the Nets is because they’re a different team than the one that began the season eking out one-point wins over bad teams while waiting for Jason Kidd to get healthy.

What’s more impressive about the 13-4 mark in the Nets’ last 17 games is that they could easily have won all but one of them. In that time, the Nets have outscored opponents by 136 points, a +8.0 average victory margin which would be the third best in the NBA over the entire season. The Nets have only one bad loss – a 21-point throttling by Minnesota – offset against nine double-digit wins. Contrast that with the first 63 games of the season, when their point differential was -276.

Perhaps even more amazing than the Nets’ run to playoff glory has been the man leading the charge: Vince Carter. The previously lily-livered Raptor was sensational again yesterday, with his 43 points leading the rout. Carter pumped in 15 of them during New Jersey’s 38-point explosion in the first quarter, a haymaker from which the Sixers never recovered, and threw in 11 boards for good measure. But it was Friday’s game in Toronto that really showed how much he’s changed his stripes in half a season.

Carter walked into the Air Canada Centre to a chorus of boos, which he richly deserved after loafing through most of the past three seasons. In his first game back since he was traded, he made himself right at home in the first quarter by settling back into his old habits. He launched several halfhearted fade away jump shots, the last of which missed the rim by a mile and ricocheted off the far side of the backboard. With its top weapon misfiring, New Jersey quickly fell behind by 10 points in a game it desperately needed.

Fortunately for the Nets, Carter quickly relocated his New Jersey attitude after leaving it south of the border for the opening 12 minutes. He took the ball to the basket with authority, got to the line, and stayed aggressive, punishing the Raptors with 17 third-quarter points to lead the Nets’ second half onslaught. For the game, Carter scored 39 points on a scintillating 15-of-26 shooting night.

We’ve come to expect that from Carter. But Nets fans should appreciate what they’re seeing, because this is the best he’s ever played. Carter is averaging 27.4 points per game since the trade – nearing his career-best of 27.6 the year he led Toronto to the second round of the playoffs. On a per-minute basis, he’s scoring more than that season. In fact, as the chart shows, all of Carter’s numbers are better as a Net than in his career year with the Raptors – he’s getting more rebounds and assists while shooting more accurately from distance and the foul line.

Seeing Carter’s numbers help make a little more sense out of the Nets’ improbable playoff run. The Nets are 31-24 when Carter plays and just 9-16 when he doesn’t, because Rod Thorn traded for a Vince Carter who was better than Thorn possibly could have expected.

If Thorn had said at the time of the Carter trade that he expected Carter to produce numbers that matched his career bests, the Nets team president would have been laughed out of the swamp. After all, Carter had an Achilles problem and hadn’t played hard in years. But for Carter to exceed those numbers? That wasn’t even on the radar.

Fortunately for Nets fans, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. In this case, the truth is that the Nets may survive the Kenyon Martin trade, Jefferson’s injury, Jason Kidd’s trade demands, and the fact that Brian Scalabrine and Jason Collins are their starting forwards, and still make the playoffs. All because “Half-man, Half-amazing” has been fully the latter in New Jersey.