Brooklyn Nets: Complete grades for the 2019 NBA offseason
By Alec Liebsch
Taurean Prince trade
Before getting to the fun stuff, the Brooklyn Nets had to free up a little more cap room. They did so by attaching their own 2019 first rounder and a lottery-protected first in 2020 to Allen Crabbe‘s contract, and receiving Taurean Prince on the last year of his rookie deal.
Crabbe has an interesting history with Brooklyn. Before even becoming a Net, he signed an egregious offer sheet with the franchise in 2016, which the Portland Trail Blazers ended up matching.
In essence, the Nets extorted Portland’s desperation to retain its own players (likely a byproduct of losing LaMarcus Aldridge to the San Antonio Spurs the summer before), forcing the team to screw itself over financially.
Brooklyn is really the only team to utilize this strategy. They also executed it on Otto Porter Jr. the following summer, which strapped the Wizards financially for multiple seasons. That cap spike in the summer of 2016 reshaped the league as a whole, but arguably Brooklyn the most.
The next summer, Portland got buyer’s remorse (shocker) and traded Crabbe into Brooklyn’s cap space. Oddly the Nets didn’t coerce a pick out of them (maybe as an apology for the previous summer?) and Crabbe was officially a Net.
His time as an actual member of the team was … disappointing. He did hit 3s at an above-average clip (37.8 percent), but to account for his poor defense, he needed to be around 40 percent for the Nets to extract any value out of him.
Coupled with his nagging injuries, Crabbe was $18.5 million poorly spent. Now in a position of contention, they offloaded him with picks to the Atlanta Hawks, a team doing exactly what Brooklyn did two summers ago.
A versatile two-way forward, Prince will act as a younger, cheaper version of DeMarre Carroll. At 6’8″ and 220 pounds, Prince has a good frame to defend multiple positions.
Entering the final year of his rookie-scale deal, he will get a chance to rebound from a disappointing third season in Atlanta.
Prince is a good shooter (38.0 percent from downtown for his career) who can take on all sorts of defensive assignments.
His advanced numbers were poor last season (-1.9 Box Plus-Minus, 0.0 Value Over Replacement Player, .047 Win Shares Per 48), but the system change likely played a part in this.
In Brooklyn, Prince will get more touches. Atlanta has a good mismatch offense, but it provides an extremely heavy dose of Young. The Nets’ heavy dose of pick-and-roll and ball movement cater to rhythm players like Prince.
It was a steep price to get off the last season of Crabbe’s contract, but it’s quite clear the team knew what it was doing. Taking a swing on Prince isn’t a bad deal