Gerald Wallace played 31 1/2 minutes on Saturday night without taking a shot. It didn't register as a super big deal at the time, because there was other stuff to talk about — namely, his current team (the Brooklyn Nets) beating his former team (the Charlotte Bobcats), point guard Deron Williams (32 points and six assists) continuing his post-All-Star surge, Reggie Evans posting his league-leading eighth 20-rebound game of the season and the Nets adding a half-game to their lead over the Chicago Bulls for the East's No. 4 seed (they added another on Sunday, thanks to the Detroit Pistons).

As has been the case for most of this Nets season, Wallace flew under the radar a bit in the immediate aftermath of the game, even though he'd clearly passed up some open looks en route to ending the game with just one point after splitting a pair of free throws. That changed a bit after the fact, though, as the 30-year-old small forward discussed the circumstances behind the rare gun-shy game — just the fourth time in nine seasons since becoming an NBA starter he'd failed to take a shot and only the second such game in which he'd played more than 12 minutes — with Tim Bontemps of the New York Post.

The oh-fer served as the nadir of a dreadful post-All-Star stretch for Wallace, and he pulled no punches in his self-assessment — he's flat-out shook when he gets the ball these days:

“My confidence is totally gone,” Wallace told The Post Saturday. “I’m just at the point now ... I’m in a situation where I feel like if I miss, I’m going to get pulled out of the game, you know what I’m saying? So my whole concept is just that you can’t come out of the game if you’re not missing shots. “I think I lost the confidence of the coaching staff and my teammates. So my main thing is those guys can score, so instead of thinking about it so much, just trying to focus on defense, try to move the ball and get those guys shots.”

First thing's first: It's pretty understandable that Wallace has zero confidence in his offensive game right now, because there's not much cause for confidence. He wasn't exactly an offensive dynamo earlier in the season, but he's fallen off a cliff since mid-February.

Before the All-Star break, Wallace was averaging 8.9 points per game on 43.2 percent shooting and connecting at a 35.1 percent clip from beyond the arc — not stellar numbers and down from his career per-minute averages (15.6 points and 7.3 rebounds per 36 minutes entering the season, 10.2 and 6 before the All-Star break), but everybody expected his scoring numbers to drop off on a team featuring Williams, Brook Lopez and Joe Johnson. But fourth option or no, his post-All-Star decline's been just awful — he's kicking in just 6.5 points per game, shooting 33.8 percent from the floor and 64.6 percent from the free-throw line (by far his worst performance at the line in a half-dozen years), and has made only seven of his last 47 attempts (a woeful 14.9 percent) from 3-point range.

And it's not just that his jumper's been janky; the misery's been pretty well spread-out, according to NBA.com's shot location stats. Yes, Wallace's accuracy has dropped by nearly 10 percent on corner 3-pointers and by just under 25 percent on above-the-break triples, but his field-goal percentage is also down just under 12 percent on shots taken inside the restricted area; on top of that, he's getting a significantly higher share of his interior tries blocked, as Bontemps noted.

About 85 percent of Wallace's shots this season have come from one of those three floor locations — his highest mark since five years ago, when he basically lived at the rim and rarely fired from deep with the Bobcats — so if he's not getting buckets at the rim or from beyond the arc, there's not a whole lot of offensive punch he can provide an offense. (Wallace has been a league-average-or-below mid-range shooter virtually his entire career, peaking at a 38.4 percent success rate between the paint and the arc during the '06-'07 season.) While he's a decent facilitator, dishing just over three assists per 36 minutes of floor time, he's also turning the ball on a higher percentage of possessions than he has in eight years.

Basically, there just aren't a whole lot of positive things that are likely to happen when Wallace has the ball right now, and it's difficult to see a scenario in which he turns that around significantly in time for the Nets to do any real postseason damage. Brooklyn coach P.J. Carlesimo said he'll look to "post [Wallace] up" to get him jump-started, which seems like a less-than-stellar plan considering Wallace is shooting 35.5 percent on post-ups and producing just 0.58 points per post possession (158th in the league), according to Synergy Sports Technology's play-tracking data.

Story continues