Brooklyn Nets: Bojan Bogdanovic A Lone Bright Spot

The 2015-16 Brooklyn Nets are bound to be — and already have been — something of a disaster. Their best player is an injury-prone Brook Lopez, they’ll be giving up this year’s first round draft pick to the Boston Celtics via the Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett trade and any chance of making that pick less valuable is pretty much gone given the team’s 1-7 start.

This is not a playoff team. In fact, the Nets might be just as bad as the Philadelphia 76ers and Los Angeles Lakers this season, which means they could be surrendering a top-3 pick to the Celtics when all is said and done. Normally that kind of slog through a tanking season would reward the fans with a shiny new rookie at the end, but Nets fans don’t even have that to look forward to.

But the Nets did manage to avoid becoming the last winless team in the NBA on Wednesday night, stunning the Houston Rockets with a 106-98 victory on the road. Lopez led the way, as he has all season, with 14 points, 12 rebounds and five blocked shots. On the year, he’s played in all eight games and is averaging 19.6 points, 8.3 rebounds and 2.1 blocks per game.

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That being said, we already know what we’re going to get out of a healthy Lopez on a given night. We’ve seen it for years and on a team where Thaddeus Young is the team’s second leading scorer, it’s no surprise to see him put up impressive individual numbers. If anything, those numbers could even be a little higher as the season goes on.

But for a Nets team with no long-term cornerstone to build around, a quick look at the team’s youngest players offers little relief for the course of the 2015-16 season. Rookie Rondae Hollis-Jefferson is going to be an excellent and versatile defender in the future, but his lack of a jump shot has severely hindered his opportunity to shine on the league’s second-worst three-point shooting team.

Chris McCullough, Brooklyn’s other rookie from this year’s draft class, probably won’t play this season as he continues to recover from a torn ACL in January. The 23-year-old Markel Brown wouldn’t find minutes on a better team and let’s be honest, if the right deal presented itself, Shane Larkin would be thrown in as a trade sweetener in a heartbeat.

Aside from Lopez and Young, the Nets have nothing to hang their hat on in 2015-16 other than Joe Johnson‘s continued decline, Andrea Bargnani being a rotation player and…well, Bojan Bogdanovic.

While the prior two things have been ugly to watch, Brooklyn’s second-year shooting guard has been a lone bright spot this season, averaging 12.5 points per game on 48.8 percent shooting from the field and 34.6 percent shooting from three-point range. Aside from Larkin’s 37.5 three-point percentage (on far fewer attempts), Bogdanovic has been the Nets’ most reliable threat from beyond the arc.

Though Lopez played a well-rounded game Wednesday night, it was Bogdanovic’s 22 points on 10-of-20 shooting that paved the way for Brooklyn’s first win of the season. He also added nine rebounds, three assists and made two of his five three-pointers, including the final dagger that put the Nets up six with 1:37 to play.

At 26 years old, Bogdanovic was originally selected with the 31st overall pick by the Miami Heat in 2011, but he stayed in Turkey with Fenerbahce Ulker for a few more seasons before joining the Nets last year. (Brooklyn owned his rights after he was traded twice on draft night.)

As an NBA rookie, he averaged 9.0 points per game on 45.3 percent shooting from the field and 35.5 percent shooting from three-point territory.

The improvement we’ve seen from Bogdanovic hasn’t been eye-opening enough to make Nets fans feel any better about their team’s current predicament, but at the very least, he looks like a player that may be a solid bench contributor by the time Brooklyn finally has good players again. You know, assuming that’s sometime in the next 10 years.

One important caveat, however: to this point, the Nets have been trying to find a permanent starting shooting guard, with Hollis-Jefferson (three games), Markel Brown (three games) and Wayne Ellington (two games) all getting their chances to start.

Bogdanovic started the second half against the Rockets since he was having a nice game, but here’s hoping Lionel Hollins doesn’t make that a trend that stunts RHJ’s development. In a lost season, it’d be perfectly fine to bring Bogdanovic in off the bench as a sixth man and let Hollis-Jefferson take his rookie lumps that will make him better for it down the road.

For the sake of development, a Larkin-Bogdanovic-RHJ-Young-Lopez lineup would probably be the best way to go, but fat chance that Hollins will bench Joe Johnson and Jarrett Jack to let that happen.

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In any case, Bojan Bogdanovic has been a rare bright spot for the Brooklyn Nets so far this season. He won’t change their fortunes by any means, but his development is a minor story line that fans might need to cling to in order to get through this season.