Mikal Bridges has longest streak of consecutive games played held by any active player in the league, so to only have played 13 minutes against the Bucks on Wednesday didn’t sit well with him.
“Didn’t like the choice and whatever that was,” Bridges said when asked about the limited minutes in Brooklyn’s 144-122 loss to Milwaukee. “But it’s whatever. Definitely was not a fan.”
The Nets were coming off a back-to-back and ruled out Spencer Dinwiddie, Cam Johnson, Dorian Finney-Smith and Nic Claxton before the game.
Then Bridges, Cam Thomas and Royce O’Neale played almost the entire first quarter, but didn’t come back on at all after that.
Brooklyn were only trailing by eight points going into the final quarter of the game, but head coach Jacque Vaughn decided not to play Dennis Smith Jr. or Day’Ron Sharpe at all in the fourth.
The coach was asked about his decision to rest active players after their game against the Pistons the night before.
“My thought was getting a feel and pulse of the game,” Vaughn said. “Mikal played 40 minutes last night, and so the thought was it wouldn’t be wise for me to continue and go down this path and then have him play 40 minutes again. You have those decisions in the course of the game. I ran Cam, Royce, and Mikal pretty long in the first quarter. Just envisioned at the end of the night that I didn’t want them touching 40 minutes again. That’s really what it boiled down to.”
Although he didn’t play as many minutes as he would have liked, the 13 minutes Bridges did play kept his consecutive game streak (422 games) going, but the forward explained that’s not his focus.
“The streak is, I guess, for everyone else to talk about. But I don’t just get in there for the streak,” Bridges told The Post. “I get in there to play the game and because I want to go out there and win. I don’t go in there to just sub in, get the streak and whatever. I just want to play.”
The 18,199 fans that were in attendance at Barclays Center were also disappointed that half the team sat.
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