Nets 2023-24 Schedule: Top Games, Championship Odds and Record Predictions

When the Brooklyn Nets arrived at training camp last season, the team was hopeful it had gotten past a deluge of turmoil and would be competing for an NBA championship.

Nope.

Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant are plying their trade elsewhere, and these Nets will go into the 2023-24 season merely hoping to compete for a playoff berth.

Mikal Bridges is now the franchise face after being the centerpiece of the trade that sent Durant to Phoenix, and it remains to be seen what he can do with a full season's worth of responsibility.

The Nets have no incentive to tank, either, with the Houston Rockets owning their first-round pick. So much like they did in the aftermath of the Kevin Garnett-Paul Pierce era, Brooklyn will be forced to retool and rebuild through savvy moves and mid-tier draft picks.

2023-24 Nets Schedule Details

Season Opener: vs. Cleveland Cavaliers (Oct. 25, 7:30 p.m. ET)

Championship Odds: +100000 (FanDuel Sportsbook)

Full Schedule: NBA.com

Top Games

Dallas Mavericks

The blame for the Nets' aborted dynasty falls largely on Irving, whose consistent disruptions created the fissure that ultimately led to the team parting ways with both All-Stars.

In Irving's three-plus seasons with the Nets, he missed 62 games due injury in 2019-20, took a midseason sabbatical to party during a pandemic and got injured in the playoffs in 2020-21, missed 53 games over his refusal to take the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021-22 and was suspended eight games for peddling an antisemitic film on social media in 2022-23.

It was quite literally impossible for the Nets to have any form of organizational cohesion with Irving causing constant chaos. Brooklyn could have done some things better to smooth over issues, but ultimately the blame rests largely with Irving.

Expect the Nets crowd to let Irving know exactly what they thought of his tenure when Mavericks visit Brooklyn this season.

The game itself won't have a particularly strong amount of intrigue, as it's a non-conference matchup between two wholly middling teams, but the pregame vitriol should be enough to get people to tune in.

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Philadelphia 76ers

Provided, of course, Ben Simmons is actually on the floor.

There is less than zero love remaining between Simmons and Philadelphia after their ugly divorce, even two years later. Simmons is perhaps the most profound disappointment of the Process Era, if only because he showed superstar promise and never lived up to his co-star billing with Joel Embiid. (Other process casualties, like Jahlil Okafor and Markelle Fultz, never enticed as much as Simmons despite disappointing in their own way.)

The anger will likely be less palpable than Simmons' two appearances in Philadelphia last season, as time tends to heal wounds and the three-time All-Star's descent to irrelevance makes him harder to dislike from a fan perspective.

That said, expect him to hear significant jeering every time he touches the ball.

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Season Prediction

The Nets are going to fade into the background and become an also-ran Eastern Conference team but not one bad enough to compete to win the lottery.

Think of them as something akin to the recent Washington Wizards, who had one star (Bradley Beal) and a group of rotating and forgettable veterans around him. Brooklyn's best-case scenario is hanging somewhere in the play-in picture while Bridges turns himself into a Most Improved Player candidate and Simmons resembles a functional basketball player.

But this is a team in the midst of a heavy retooling, and almost every member of the roster save for Bridges could be traded at any moment. Spencer Dinwiddie in particular seems like a virtual certainty to wind up playing elsewhere at some point this season, provided the Nets can land acceptable draft compensation in return.

Expect nothing more than a .500 record to come out of Barclays Center.

Record Prediction: 37-45