Tenth Victory Means Nets Are Bad, Not Historic

History will reflect that the Nets of 2009-10 are bad. It will also now reflect that they are not the worst team in N.B.A. history.

After serving as the league’s version of the Washington Generals much of this season, the Nets stiff-armed infamy by claiming their 10th victory in their 74th game, a 90-84 victory Monday over a depleted version of the San Antonio Spurs“We got 10,” the public address announcer Gary Sussman said as the final buzzer sounded. Never has a 10th victory so late in the season been so sweet. The Nets’ win means that the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers will keep their distinction with nine victories in an 82-game season.

This is as good as it will probably get for the Nets, who collectively breathed a sigh of relief that it did not get as bad as it could have gotten. The season started ominously. The team parted with its longtime coach Lawrence Frank, set the record for most losses to start a season with 18, and bequeathed interim coaching duties on a hesitant Kiki Vandeweghe, its general manager.

Along the way, the organization pointed to hopeful bright spots ahead: a move from the Meadowlands to Newark and eventually Brooklyn, their pending sale to the Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov and the salary cap space they have cleared ahead of this summer’s potential free-agent bonanza. But the nagging issue of whether this team could separate itself from the old 76ers team remained.

“You don’t have to ask me about it and you do not get to ask me about it every day,” Vandeweghe said afterward. The Spurs never shook the Nets, despite building an 11-point lead, a product of their backcourt attrition. Tony Parker is out. Manu Ginobili did not play, citing back spasms, and Roger Mason Jr. left in the second quarter after spraining his right pinkie.

Perhaps Brett Yormark will now have some positive points to discuss Tuesday when he meets with a fan he confronted last Monday. Yormark, the Nets chief executive, took exception to Chris Lisi’s wearing a brown bag over his head during the Nets loss to Miami on March 22
The marketing-savvy Yormark turned the confrontation into a meeting of the minds, bag-lunch style. The meeting will be streamed on the Nets Web site at noon. At its least, the meeting should be more evenly matched than most of the Nets games this season.