Brooklyn Nets: Bleak Present, Apocalyptic Future
By Phil Watson
Brooklyn Nets fans need to watch this video clip over and over and over and over again.
This, my friends, is what more than $100 million in salaries and $90 million in luxury tax for 2013-14 and nearly $90 million in salary and almost $36 million in luxury tax, per ESPN New York, for 2014-15 bought—one first-round playoff win over the playoff-neophyte Toronto Raptors.
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Not exactly the Big Three era in Miami, no?
The present, meanwhile, is bleak. Two of the players brought in for last year’s second-round run—Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett—are in different uniforms now.
What Brooklyn has is a 30-year-old Deron Williams who plays like he’s already 40, the bad foot of Brook Lopez, the contract of Joe Johnson and the presence of Thaddeus Young—who appears to be the heir apparent to Shareef Abdur-Rahim, the good player on the perennially bad team.
There are some decent supporting pieces around in young center Mason Plumlee and Croatian guard Bojan Bogdanovic.
And there’s the hope that springs eternal for teams via the NBA Draft.
Except, wait … no there isn’t.
The Nets are 1½ games out of the eighth spot in the Eastern Conference with 13 games left on their schedule. ESPN’s Hollinger Playoff Odds have Brooklyn at a 16.2 percent chance of making the postseason. That means an 83.8 percent chance of being in the lottery.
Good news for a team that needs new blood, right?
Except that the Atlanta Hawks—thanks to the ill-fated trade for Johnson—have the right to swap picks with the Nets this year.
So instead of a lottery pick that would, barring any lucky bounces—and God knows there have been few of those for the Nets since they joined the NBA from the ABA in 1976—be no lower than ninth overall, they are instead looking at having the 29th overall pick, based on Atlanta’s 53-17 mark.
In the lottery era, the 29th overall pick has been home to players who actually did receive paychecks for playing professional basketball.
Star power? Not so much.
Of the 30 players taken at that position in the draft since 1985, six of them never played a minute in the NBA. So, hey, a 20 percent chance of complete bust! Awesome!
Three of the 30 achieved a negative number for career win shares. (Do they become loss shares at that point?) So, hey, a 10 percent chance of a player who contributes even less than a complete bust! Awesome!
Much of the rest of the list reads like a who’s who of the who??? section of the NBA register, such household names as Alando Tucker, Archie Goodwin, Leon Smith, Dyron Nix, Daniel Orton, Wayne Simien, David Harrison, Cory Alexander and Antonio Lang.
But there’s the real contributors, the guys like D.J. White, Cory Joseph, Travis Knight, Toney Douglas and Dancin’ Mark Madsen.
The best of the bunch at No. 29 overall are P.J. Brown and Toni Kukoc.
Yes, the best-case scenario is a guy who won’t average double figures.
There have been better pieces around which to rebuild a franchise, trust me.
But it’ll get better in 2016 … except it won’t because that pick is going to the Boston Celtics for the corpses of Pierce and Garnett.
In 2017, it will be much better though. Except, no, they may have to swap their pick in 2017 with the Celtics, assuming they finish worse than Boston (a safe assumption at this point).
And in 2018, the Garnett-Pierce trade will be the gift that keeps on giving … to the Celtics, in the form of yet another first-round pick.
But hey, by 2019, they’ll have their own pick (unless Billy King decides to swap it, too, since they can’t trade it outright because of the Stepien rule).
Based on that draft outlook for the next four years, the 2019 pick promises to be a hella good one–like no lower than fourth, barring changes to the current lottery setup.
Yeah, the future in Brooklyn does not exactly look bright. It makes The Walking Dead seem like a win-win scenario.
We’re not talking bad. We’re talking a basketball apocalypse, a mushroom cloud of dyed-orange leather hanging over the borough for the next five years at a minimum.
They’ll be tanking and they won’t even have to pull a Sam Hinkie and trade every ambulatory player on the roster away to do it.
It could make that 12-70 mark in New Jersey in 2009-10 look like the glory years of the 1960s Celtics, because at least that Nets team had a few pieces around which to build, such as a young Brook Lopez before he started channeling Bill Walton with the whole foot not remaining in one piece thing.
There isn’t anyone on the current Nets roster that screams “this is the guy we build around.”
Fans have been screaming for the head of King. It’s not a bad idea, but is there anyone out there who would take on the task that looms for the Nets?
That task would appear to be this: We want you to rebuild the franchise, which is currently overloaded with large contracts, injury risks and 30-somethings and you have to do it without lottery picks (most likely) for the next four years.
Yeah, sign me up. So I can get fired in three or four years.
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The Nets went all-in, which could be considered admirable in an era in the NBA where it seems to be OK to intentionally construct teams designed to lose 79 games a season.
But they did it in the dumbest, most ill-conceived way ever—trading away seasons worth of first-round picks to get guys in their mid- to late 30s. Had these moves been made in 2007 they could have been amazing.
In 2012 and 2013? Amazing isn’t exactly what springs to mind.
So depending on how well the Hubris Zen Master is able to turn things around in Manhattan, it’s possible New York City could have two steaming radioactive craters where NBA franchises used to be.
So many disaster movies are set in New York. So why not use it as the location for Hoopocalypse Now … And Later?
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