The Brooklyn Nets have opened the season as meekly as an expensively built team could. Having staggered to a 4-13 start, the Nets are destined to miss the playoffs for the first time in their fourth season east in the Empire State.
The Nets’ ailments are too many for the best basketball doctor to count. Poor shooting torpedoed them from the beginning as they lost their first seven games. Lionel Hollins, whose oversaw a brilliant defense with the Memphis Grizzlies from 2010-13, hasn’t inspired the men wearing black and white to show discipline on that end.
For that matter, Hollins has done little to lift the Nets, for which he now seems ill-fit. By now, he’s at a loss trying to address the woes of a team standing fourth in the Atlantic Division, a place granted mercifully by the existence of the Philadelphia 76ers.
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The best Hollins and the Nets can do is win enough games to tread water and develop young talent like Bojan Bogdanovic and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson since the franchise traded their 2016 first-round draft pick to the Boston Celtics in the Kevin Garnett deal.
But an unwillingness of Hollins, the presence of a point guard in Jarrett Jack who isn’t good enough to be a water-treading assistant and a lack of desirable trade assets hinder the move to retool.
The combination of these woes render the Nets’ 2015-16 campaign a lost one. Following is analysis of how each item mires Brooklyn in its pit of despair.
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