Brooklyn Nets: With No Picks, NBA Draft Night A Bore

Just because you have the same amount of draft picks as the Brooklyn Nets heading into Thursday night does not mean the two of you are equals. Chances are, unlike them, you are not overseen by a Russian billionaire, have a point guard without ankles or are a group of people who more closely resemble a zombie flick than a basketball team.

On the other hand, they are an actual NBA basketball franchise and you are not — so there’s that.

As far as Thursday goes, though, it will be a tremendous sporting day. The daytime will see the U.S. battle Germany for World Cup awesomeness. Now, while that is not the official title of the victor, it is something along those lines — I think.

Then, just a few hours later, the 2014 NBA Draft will get under way. A day that millions of fans and a slew of NBA teams could not wait for. A night where the hope of a young player brings to a team gets a face when a team selects its newest addition to their roster.

Whether it be in the lottery or somewhere in the second-round, each NBA team gets a little bit younger and each fan of that team overrates that player because they are in the middle of having a fit of biased hope oozing through their body.

Well, that is for most NBA teams at least. Not every single one of them will get to call a player’s name on Thursday night.

Some, by design because of cap space, will prefer to not select any at all, others might decide to stockpile for the future and then there will be the Brooklyn Nets.

You know, the aging and already decrepit Brooklyn Nets. Brooklyn, who many have speculated will buy a pick at some point, will mostly likely have to watch as their home arena, The Barclays Center, continue to give each fanbase some hope and youth, all while the Nets continued to age more like a gallon of milk and not a bottle of wine.

Everyone knew this was an eventuality, though. That, when the Nets decided to trade and sign for every aging superstar in the sun, there would come a time when they would have to bite the bullet somewhere.

Most people expected that place to be free agency because cap space doesn’t grow on trees, but we also knew that giving up as many draft picks as they had for players would put them in a spot where having a draft pick, any draft pick, in the foreseeable future was unlikely as Square Enix finally caving in and rebooting Final Fantasy VII.

Nevertheless, that does not make draft night a failure for the Brooklyn Nets. It would be dumb to act like having a pick in the 50s meant some higher degree of competence was going on in the front offices of the Nets organization.

While this version of the NBA Draft is deeper than Scrooge McDuck’s pockets, buying a pick somewhere late in the second-round because they had $2 million available to do so would not mean genius was running rampant throughout the franchise.

It would have just meant that they are willing to spend some loot to take a flyer out on a kid. That’s it — and we already know they are unafraid to spend large sums of money on bad decisions.

It is also not as if they have a lot of tradeable assets at their disposal. Players who are in a steep decline with huge contracts are not exactly the easiest parts to move.

It is why many felt that this season was the one-year window for the Nets to do serious damage in the Eastern Conference. Since they married themselves to aging stars via big bucks they would have to eat all their decisions by having the contracts play out under their organization, which means gloomy days are a likely ahead for Brooklyn.

Even with that being said, with me continuing to bash the Nets for their lack of long-term vision, draft night will not define the organization, with or without draft picks. It would just be another night. A night where the entire U.S. will still catching its collective breath from a soccer match a few hours before, where the hopes and dreams of NBA fan bases were put on the shoulders of teenagers and the Brooklyn Nets were watching everything unfold in their own arena — all while, presumably, petting a bald cat on its head and doing nothing else.