If you watch Nets basketball, you come to one glaring realization: With Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving on the floor the majority of the minutes, this is an isolation-heavy team.

As they should be, but it’s become increasingly clear in recent games that the Nets can’t rely on the greatness of their two scorers alone if they want to win a championship this season or beyond. Celtics head coach Ime Udoka pointed it out ahead of a March 6 Boston victory over the Nets.

“I know their game,” the ex-Nets assistant said. “It’s not about their sets, offensively. It’s about who they are. They’re not running anything complicated. It’s get them the ball and let them do what they do.”

It’s easy to fall into the isolation trap when you have two talents as gifted as Irving and Durant, each of whom are under Hall of Fame consideration in large part due to their ability to generate offense in the face of the most creative defensive schemes opposing coaching staffs can concoct.

Iso-ball, however, can only get you so far. To win big, the Nets need to play offense on a string, just like they strive to play defense: all five players moving in synchronization.

“Yeah, I think we’re an isolation-heavy team because [Kevin and Kyrie are] so gifted, but that’s not the plan,” head coach Steve Nash said on Friday. “The plan is to get into as many actions as possible, and hopefully it takes one and we’re in the paint, and we get a good look.”

Nash said sometimes it can look like Irving and Durant are taking turns with the basketball, and indeed, to the naked eye it does. The two have combined to use more than 60% of the team’s offensive possessions since the Feb. 10 James Harden trade, which makes sense when you consider the two combine for 45% of the payroll.

It makes even more sense when you consider Joe Harris has been with a severely injured ankle since Nov. 14 and Ben Simmons has yet to make his Nets debut since arriving on Feb. 10 via the Harden deal.

The Nets, oftentimes, don’t have much more action to run other than get Durant or Irving the ball and get out of the way.

But that’s not good basketball, and as the Nets continue to get healthy leading into the play-in tournament and, they hope, a first-round playoff appearance, they will need to continue adding additional wrinkles into their offense.

Which will be a difficult task given the reality of their season, but a task that must be tackled head-on nonetheless.

The plan, as Nash said, is indeed to build a more complicated offense, but this is a team that has featured more than 40 different starting lineups, a team forced to endure a blockbuster trade midseason when Harden – the roster’s chief playmaker – forced his way to Philly for another playmaker who has yet to make his debut in Brooklyn. The Nets aren’t whole. In fact, they just waived James Johnson, who played backup point guard and Swiss Army knife as a reserve for most of the season.

The Nets, though, are going to continue working on that offense, even if they’re working on it through the play-in into the first round of the playoffs.

“We want to continue to bring players in the actions so that we give the defense decisions to make, we ask questions of the defense, we see if they make a mistake or we create a slight advantage instead of just all watching them,” Nash said. “But when (Durand and Irving) move it back and forth, that is ball movement anyways. It’s not like just because they only passed it to each other, that possession is bad. Sometimes that’s all it takes to shift the defense and now we’ve created a small advantage.”

Nash pointed to the second half of the team’s victory against the Knicks on Wednesday as proof a high level of ball movement and offensive action is indeed possible. The Knicks built a 21-point lead and had the Nets on the verge of their most disappointing loss in a season full of disappointing losses before Brooklyn turned on the jets in the second half. The Nets are continuing to learn each other, and time is not on their side.

But then again, that’s what Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving are for: When an offensive action breaks down, you can always lean on your superstar scorers to get a bucket.

“It’s a work in progress,” Nash said. “This group’s not played too many games together, so trying to get deeper into our philosophy takes time, but I think the second half in New York was a glimpse of some of the positivity and productivity of that mindset versus the first half where it was the opposite.”

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