Spencer Dinwiddie takes advantage of opportunity with Brooklyn Nets

* Recap: Nets 100, Hawks 105

As they sift through the roster to find a gem or two to keep for the short or long term, the Brooklyn Nets believe a guy who was given up by the Pistons and Bulls will stick around.

That would be Spencer Dinwiddie.

He came a rebound away form a triple double Friday in Atlanta and also rallied the Nets late by making the eventual game-winning basket. Dinwiddie is clearly one of the league’s biggest surprises this season and for a developing team like the Nets, he’s a big catch. He’s having breakout here at age 24, when he was pressed into action with injuries suffered by Jeremy Lin and D’Angelo Russell.

The rewards have come right on time for Dinwiddie, who was the third-string guard in Detroit and then couldn’t stick with a Bulls’ team that starved for point guard help. But timing is everything in the NBA and Dinwiddie is proof of that. He wound up in Brooklyn, where the Nets needed to look far and wide for talent. And even then, Dinwiddie was hardly projected for major playing time when he arrived.

But the injuries pushed him up the rotation and now he’s a primary option for Brooklyn. Here’s Ben Detrick of The Ringer on the fourth-year guard:

Halfway through the season, the 24-year-old is having a breakout year as an unexpected answer in the Nets’ injury-ravaged backcourt. Since inheriting the starting job from D’Angelo Russell after the former Laker went down in mid-November, Dinwiddie is averaging 14.7 points, 3.1 rebounds, and 7.0 assists per game (which is 10th in the NBA in that span). Stunningly, for the season, he ranks 13th in the NBA by ESPN’s real plus-minus, just ahead of Chris Paul and Joel Embiid. The Nets have been gamely rebuilding without the trove of precious draft picks surrendered to the Celtics in that malingering 2013 trade, and their youthful cadre of guys like Dinwiddie, Russell, Caris LeVert, and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson is slowly maturing into a respectable foundation.

It’s dangerous to erect bronze statues for guys who rack up splashy stats on middling teams—Brooklyn is currently 15-26—but Dinwiddie’s numbers have intriguing depth. With a stingy 1.4 turnovers an outing, he is near the top of the NBA in assist-to-turnover ratio among players who earn substantial minutes, despite helming an offense that sprints the hardwood at the fifth-fastest tempo in the league. Maybe most telling: In the 1,114 minutes Dinwiddie has been on the floor, the Nets have an offensive rating of 105.4; when he’s on the sideline, it plunges to 99.2. That’s essentially the difference between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Sacramento Kings.

“I didn’t just wake up a month ago, like, ‘Hey, I can play basketball really good now, guys!’” Dinwiddie says of his surprising success. “It took the coaching staff’s belief in me. They didn’t go find a vet or sign another guy. That’s what’s producing this.”

He is further proof that the Nets know what they’re doing — finally. Consider that they’ve created ways to get Russell, Jahlil Okafor, DeMarre Carroll and Nik Stauskas while giving up very little, mainly because they didn’t have much to give up. The only downside in these deals is they threw in their first-rounder last year in the Russell trade, and the Lakers used that pick to select Kyle Kuzma.

Oh well, no plan is perfect.

But Sean Marks might be the hardest-working GM in the game (because he has no choice) and Brooklyn, very slowly, is delivering on the rebuilding plan.

Brooklyn is still near the bottom in the East and doesn’t own its No. 1 pick this coming summer, but they control their picks starting next year. By then, with a favorable salary cap and some decent talent on hand, the Nets could be ready to make a move.

* * *