Murky Future In Brooklyn For D-Will
By Phil Watson
Deron Williams will turn 31 on June 26, just before the new NBA year begins. And for the erstwhile point guard for the Brooklyn Nets, it is shaping up to be a summer of uncertainty.
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To say he’s no longer the player NBA general managers selected as the best point guard in the league would be a wild display of understatement.
That was almost five years ago, when Williams was coming off his first All-Star season with the Utah Jazz, averaging 18.7 points, 10.5 assists and 1.3 steals on .469/.371/.801 shooting and earning an All-NBA second team nod.
At that point, he was two years removed from helping the U.S. reclaim its spot atop the basketball world as a member of the 2008 national team that took gold in Beijing.
Williams was so good then that the guys who ran the franchises picked him—not Chris Paul, not Steve Nash, not Chauncey Billups—as the best at his position in the NBA.
After a season during which Williams—presumably healthy after offseason surgery on his troublesome ankles—averaged 13 points and 6.6 assists per game and shot a career-worst .387, it seems almost unfathomable that he was once thought of as the best at his profession.
At the trade deadline in 2011, the moribund New Jersey Nets rolled the dice on acquiring a franchise player, sending Derrick Favors—the third overall pick in the previous summer’s draft—along with Devin Harris and two first-round draft picks to Utah to get Williams.
The following summer, the Nets signed Williams to a five-year, nearly $99 million contract to be their guy, the guy that would lead the newly minted Brooklyn Nets out of almost four decades of obscurity.
But the Williams that Brooklyn owes a shade more than $21 million to for 2015-16 and could be on the hook for more than $22.3 million in 2016-17 if Williams chooses not to exercise his early termination option isn’t that guy.
Not even close.
The athleticism is gone. Williams had a career-low (obviously) zero dunks in 2014-15 and shot just 39.5 percent at the rim. Five years ago, when he was named the best point guard in the NBA, that percentage was 50.1.
But the reality for the Nets is that Williams—in terms of trade scenarios—is nearly valueless. He’s not going to command a package of picks in return. He’s not going to command a high-impact player in return.
Fifty cents on the dollars? Hell, the Nets would be lucky to recoup a small fraction of that in a trade.
And the problem is that while his impact on the floor is nothing compared to what it once was, he is still the player Brooklyn can least afford to be without.
With Williams on the floor for more than 2,100 minutes in 2014-15, the Nets had a net rating of plus-0.1. Not superstar stuff, but compared to the minus-6.7 net rating Brooklyn posted in his almost 1,900 minutes on the bench, it’s championship stuff.
That minus-6.7 rating was the lowest on the Nets, meaning Williams—limited though he is—was Brooklyn’s most indispensable player.
By contrast, backup Jarrett Jack produced a net rating of minus-7.8 points per 100 possessions when he was on the floor and a plus-3.0 when he wasn’t.
That’s a terrifying thought for a fan base that will have to swallow a swap of first-round picks this June with the Atlanta Hawks, part of the ongoing repercussions from the Joe Johnson trade in 2012, a price that won’t be fully realized until Brooklyn conveys its 2017 second-round selection to the Hawks.
That means instead of having the 15th pick—the first selection after the lottery—the Nets will draft 29th in the first round after Atlanta’s franchise-record 60-win campaign.
If that were the extent to which the Nets bankrupted their future in a galactically huge failure to win now, it would be bad. But the future is so very much worse than that.
The Nets don’t have a first-round pick in 2016, sent to the Boston Celtics for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, two aging stars who are no longer in the black-and-white.
The Nets may have to ship their 2017 first-rounder to the Celtics as part of the same deal. Their 2018 first-rounder belongs to Boston.
For this, general manager Billy King could be in line for a contract extension, according to Grantland’s Zach Lowe.
Lowe suggests the Nets could use the stretch provision to dump Williams, eating $9 million a year in dead salary cap space through 2019-20 in return.
ESPN New York’s Mike Mazzeo, however, suggests a buyout is a more realistic possibility, citing “multiple NBA sources.”
Nets coach Lionel Hollins admitted in the wake of Brooklyn’s elimination in six games at the hands of the Hawks that Williams is not what he once was.
"“He’s not a franchise player anymore,” Hollins said. “He’s a good player, he’s a solid player, but I don’t think he’s a franchise player anymore. That’s just my opinion. He’s a good player. I’m proud of the way he’s bounced back and played and there’s so much pressure on him to be a franchise player and everybody talks about a franchise player, but we need to have a franchise team.“That means we have everybody going out there and playing hard, playing together, sharing the ball. If a guy is open, he makes a shot. If a guy is not open, he passes to another guy and he makes the shot. To me that’s what basketball is about. It’s not about a franchise player. I mean, those guys come along once in a lifetime and everybody doesn’t get a chance to coach one.”"
Besides the physical limitations to his game, Williams has taken shots from his former teammate for one season, Pierce, for his lack of leadership.
"“Before I got there, I looked at Deron as an MVP candidate,” Pierce told ESPN Boston’s Jackie MacMullan last month. “But I felt once we got there, that’s not what he wanted to be. He just didn’t want that.“I think a lot of the pressure got to him sometimes. This was his first time in the national spotlight. The media in Utah is not the same as the media in New York, so that can wear on some people. I think it really affected him.”"
So, to review, what we have is a guy getting franchise-player money, but one who his own coach doesn’t think is a franchise player anymore and one who an influential former teammate claims isn’t committed to the cause in Brooklyn and shirks the spotlight and the pressure.
King said Wednesday, via ESPN New York, that getting Brook Lopez and Thaddeus Young under contract as the building blocks for the team is his top priority and seemed open to the idea of trading Williams and Johnson.
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“We could have done it at the deadline,” King said of moving Williams and Johnson. “A couple of them we could have moved at the deadline and we chose not to.”
Reportedly, the Nets had a deal in place to swap Williams to the Sacramento Kings for Darren Collison, but Sacramento’s insistence that young center Mason Plumlee be part of the trade was a deal breaker.
The Nets rolled the dice on Williams in 2012 as the face of the new Brooklyn Nets. The result has been two second-round exits and one first-round playoff loss.
And the lingering question of what to do about the nearly $43.4 million still due to Deron Williams over the next two seasons.
A potential no-win scenario, to be sure, but something Nets fans have become resigned to for most of the nearly four decades of almost uninterrupted futility since the franchise joined the NBA as part of the ABA-NBA merger in 1976.
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