Brooklyn Nets Are a Playoff Team for Now, but Their Future Looks Bleak
The intention was to become championship contenders. Unfortunately, good intentions don't win rings.
In reality, when the Brooklyn Nets put together a massive deal to bring Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry a couple hundred miles south of Boston in June 2013, they threw their future away along with a smorgasbord of draft picks.
A reasonable person could've argued the trade was helpful for the Nets at the time. At the very least, it wasn't an all-time gaffe. That is, until we saw the protections on all those picks—there were none.
The Nets were coming off a 49-win season, looking to spend dollars and identified three guys with "winning" resumes who were still contributors to a playoff team the previous season.
Brooklyn sent a slew of veterans to the Boston Celtics along with first-round picks, all of which were unprotected, in the 2014, 2016 and 2018 NBA drafts. The trade also gave Boston the option to swap picks in 2017. And considering that the Nets owe the Atlanta Hawks pick-swapping rights in 2015 from the Joe Johnson deal the previous summer, Brooklyn continued to worsen its chances of surviving down the line.
2012-13, Pierce and Garnett's final season in Boston, was still kind to the two vets. The following year, the first and only one they shared in Brooklyn, was a bit more disconcerting, eventually ending in a second-round playoff loss to the Miami Heat. Terry, meanwhile, didn't even end last season with the Nets.
If Pierce was the bully, KG was always the guy who would stand behind him, staring at all the big kids his counterpart would beat up on just enough to intimidate them into not retaliating. In reality, the starer's job wasn't to bully. It was just to gaze, to create the illusion of bullying. And the 38-year-old Garnett, who has been in the league since 1995, has become his generation's biggest hologram of a bully.
Now, though, the Nets have a problem, because Pierce darted to the Washington Wizards and Garnett, the man who once held the distinction of "Best Player in the NBA," has transformed into a hologram of himself, and projections of formerly dominant stars are not worth the entire solar system in an exchange.
The Nets are now set up with five consecutive seasons in which they may not have their own first-round selection. Of the first 10 players projected to come off their bench, five are 30 or older. And that doesn't account for the money.
Outside of roster exceptions, there's essentially no flexibility with a group of players that was expensive enough to set a luxury-tax record last season. The Nets' $95.8 million 2014-15 payroll is the NBA's highest, per Basketball Insiders, and puts them a little less than $33 million over this year's ~$63 million salary cap.
Next year won't be much different. The team has almost $56 million on the books for 2015-16, and that's without accounting for Brook Lopez, who has a $16.7 million player option he could pick up before the following season.
Of course, the Nets will regain some cap flexibility—just as everyone else in the league—when the 2016-17 season comes. That's when the NBA's new nine-year, $24 billion television deal kicks in, and with that, the cap is expected to bolt, possibly past $80 million.
Still, all of these cap and draft struggles are why ESPN.com ranked the Nets dead last in its NBA Future Power Rankings (subscription required), a project evaluating which organizations are in the best position moving forward. As Amin Elhassan wrote, Brooklyn has been doomed for some time:
"When they gave pick-swap rights to Atlanta for the right to overpay Joe Johnson, we said in unison, "No!"
When they gave up all those unprotected first-rounders for the last gasps of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Jason Terry, we all cried, "Don't do it!" When their luxury tax dwarfed the total payroll of every other NBA team, we collectively face-palmed.
But it didn't matter, as the Nets steamrolled their way to a team destined to be a second-round knockout, doubling down on an aging roster with limited upside. Add onto that Lawrence Frank debacle a month into last season, and the failed coup (and eventual departure) by Jason Kidd this summer, and it's easy to place the Nets among the most dysfunctional franchises in the NBA. As a result, here they are, with no cap respite until 2016, a depleted pick inventory and no blue-chip talent outside of the oft-injured Brook Lopez.
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The good news for the Nets is they have ownership willing to spend money. The bad is that the current administration is the same one that doled out countless picks to the Celtics for aging veterans. It's the same one that gave up other picks for four years of an overly criticized but still highly priced Johnson.
Nets general manager Billy King admits the organization's immediate future is troubling, even in his most optimistic tone, as he told CBS Philadelphia radio back in June (h/t to Nets Daily and Devin Kharpertian of The Brooklyn Game):
"We'll be looking to acquire other assets down the road to replace some of those (picks). Those years that…we don't have picks, right now we're looking to have a lot of cap space. So at that point in time, you want to maximize cap space, you try to project out. You get to (20)18, you can make deals to get picks going forward.
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Except there's one problem here. 2018 is a long way away, and considering the Nets have either given away their first-rounder or have allowed the right to swap picks in each year until 2019, it's going to be hard to build an economically sound model until Willow Smith is old enough to head off to college.
King shows off a strange dichotomy in that quote. Giving up loads of unprotected future picks for slight, short-sighted upgrades implies a disregard for the future, the type of move a GM whose job is on the line would make. But now that these deals haven't fully worked out, King is looking half a decade down the line, implying all the job security in the world for someone who's been working for Mikhail Prokhorov since 2010.
For now, Brooklyn is a top-eight team in the East, especially if Deron Williams progresses on what was easily his worst-ever season last year. Even if he doesn't, which would put this organization in even worse shape given that he still has three more years of a max deal, the loss of Pierce doesn't turn a squad that went 24-13 in its final 37 contests into a non-playoff team—especially in a still-weak Eastern Conference.
Come mid-April, the Nets may find themselves in the playoffs for the third straight season, but as a likely bottom-four seed, that's still thinking in the short-term. The Nets are stuck barely living in the present and mostly residing in the past, and because of that, the future looks particularly grim.
Fred Katz averaged almost one point per game in fifth grade but maintains that his per-36-minute numbers were astonishing. Find more of his work at WashingtonPost.com or on ESPN's TrueHoop Network at ClipperBlog.com. Follow him on Twitter at @FredKatz.
Unless otherwise noted, all statistics are current as of Oct. 13 and are courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com.
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