Fear not, Nets fans. Help is on the way. Yes, the team missed out on Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Robert Traylor after getting spooked by the results of their physicals, but that doesn’t mean the Nets didn’t make major improvements during the off-season. No, they didn’t get a nightly 20-10 threat to play the power forward spot, but what general manager Rod Thorn did get could be even more important: secondary scorers.

Despite having Jason Kidd, Vince Carter, and Richard Jefferson, the Nets were a horrible offensive team last season. This fact isn’t widely known because New Jersey’s defense helped it to a respectable 42-40 record, but the Nets ranked only 27th of the league’s 30 teams in Offensive Efficiency (my measure of a team’s points scored per 100 possessions). In fact, until Carter fueled a surge to the playoffs in the final 20 games, New Jersey ranked dead last.

This doesn’t seem possible, because almost any team with two stars the caliber of Kidd and Carter will at least be average offensively. For the Nets to rank so badly despite the efforts of those two, the other players would have to be unbelievably bad.

Well, guess what … they were un-believ-ably bad. To see how bad, let’s look at the True Shooting Percentage (TS%) of the 10 Nets who played at least 1,000 minutes last season. True Shooting Percentage is like field-goal percentage, except it accounts for free-throws and 3-pointers as well. To calculate it, start with a player’s free-throw attempts, multiply by 0.44, and then add his field goal attempts. Take that result and divide a player’s points by it, and you have his TS%.

The league average in TS% is 52.4, so one would expect most of a team’s key players to at least be within shouting distance of that mark. In New Jersey’s case, three players exceeded it: Carter, Jefferson, and Nenad Krstic. Jason Kidd, fell short at 50.6,but he more than made up for it by setting up so many points for the others.

As for the rest of New Jersey’s supporting cast, it wasn’t pretty. Guards Jacque Vaughn and Travis Best were the only ones to even get within five percentage points of the league average. Jason Collins led the team in minutes while connecting at 47.1%, and mid-season pickup Clifford Robinson did the same. Brian Scalabrine rarely shot, but when he did he was even worse at 46.8%. (Have fun with that one, Danny Ainge). And then there’s Rodney Buford, who was allowed to play 1,314 minutes and hoist nearly 500 shots despite owning one of the NBA’s worst TS% rates.

Overall, the damage those Nets did completely negated the brilliance of Carter and Kidd. Although three of the four key offensive players were above the league average and the fourth wasn’t far below it, the Nets ranked 27th in the NBA in TS% because the role players were so unrelentingly awful.

Thankfully, the work undertaken by Thorn during the off-season has changed the landscape dramatically. Already having several quality defenders, Thorn made it a point to shop for offense, and he got it. When the Abdur-Rahim deal fell through, he picked up shot-making center Marc Jackson from Philadelphia, who averaged 20 points per 40 minutes last season. To shore up the backcourt, he signed Cleveland’s steady shooting Jeff McInnis. In the draft, he picked up Texas A &M scoring machine Antoine Wright. And to cap it off, he added shooting specialists Scott Padgett and Lamond Murray on minimum contracts this past week.

A brief comparison of the new with the old shows what an impact these players may have on New Jersey’s offense off the bench in 2005-06:

–In the middle, Jackson’s TS% last season was 54.8, allowing Collins to keep his 47.1 TS% on the pine for much longer stretches.

–At power forward, Padgett’s 54.9 mark is similarly impressive and a huge improvement on Robinson’s 47.1 and Jabari Smith’s 46.8.

–Small forward Murray had a solid 53.7 TS%, replacing the substandard output of Scalabrine (46.8) and Ron Mercer (43.2).

–Wright is a possibility at shooting guard, but so is third-year guard Zoran Planinic. Planinic missed most of last season with an injury but his TS% of 53.4 when he played will be a big improvement on Buford’s brutal 43.7.

–Finally, at the point, McInnis had a TS% of 49.5, which isn’t great, but he’s far more aggressive than Vaughn and Best. That means he’ll take some heat off Carter and Kidd to force shots.

As a result of those additions, the Nets have substantially better shooters than they did a year ago at every position. This is important because the Nets already have the primary ingredients of a good offense with Carter, Jefferson, and Kidd. All they need are secondary players who can make open shots and discourage defenses from swarming Carter.

Last season, those shooters were missing, a shortcoming that Miami exposed brilliantly in the postseason. With the Heat sending multiple defenders at Carter and essentially daring players like Robinson and Scalabrine to beat them, a sweep was inevitable. But in the span of one off-season, Thorn has managed to turn New Jersey’s biggest weakness into a notable strength. This year, with at least one capable jump shooter manning every position, the Nets won’t be nearly as easy to defend. Bring it on, Shaq.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast.