Building the Brooklyn Nets' Point Guard Rotation in a Post-Deron Williams World

The Brooklyn Nets had to buy out Deron Williams, but that doesn't mean they're in better basketball shape for the upcoming season with him gone.

The decision to let Williams go was purely a monetary one, general manager Billy King admitted over the weekend.

"We wouldn't have done this if we didn't get under the tax," he said. "It wasn't a mandate. It was just something that I felt, the goal. If we're not going to be championship level, there's no need to be a taxpayer."

With the team under the tax line for the upcoming season, Brooklyn doesn't have to worry about paying the dreaded repeater tax in the near future. There's no point in putting yourself in that position if you don't think you're capable of contending for a title. In that sense, the Nets clearly made the right move.

Betting on Larkin

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From a basketball sense, Brooklyn is worse off without its 2014-15 starting point guard. And the remaining orchestrators on the roster, Jarrett Jack and Shane Larkin, leave the team in a sticky spot.

Obviously, Jack is the starter. And in the end, how much of a drop-off is he from Williams? How quickly we forget there was a time just this past season when he was actually starting ahead of D-Will. 

Head coach Lionel Hollins, though, isn't ready to hand him the starting job with time left in the offseason.

"When we step on the court, we'll figure out all that," he said. "And, you know, we've still got some time left on it. Anything could happen."

The Nets coach made that statement shortly after announcing the news that Williams was heading out of town.

Then, "anything" happened. The next day, they announced they had shipped off Steve Blake, acquired from the Portland Trail Blazers on draft night, to the Detroit Pistons for Quincy Miller. For a day or so, it appeared Brooklyn could mix Jack, Blake and Larkin in different ways since two of them (the non-Larkins of the group) could play at both guard positions.

Now, though, Brooklyn is back to just two floor generals, and there's that depth issue, even if Jack is a slight defensive upgrade on Williams in the first unit.

Frank Franklin II/Associated Press

Larkin has struggled during both of his seasons in the pros as a shooter, as a distributor, as a defender—but there is some reason for hope.

Even if we haven't seen the former Miami Hurricane make a significant impact with the team that drafted him (the Dallas Mavericks) or the team he was traded to after just one season (the New York Knicks), you don't have to be the world's biggest optimist to make a case for his future.

Maybe he just hasn't found a comfortable spot in the league. Maybe that can come in Brooklyn.

He looked like a rookie during year one, playing behind Monta Ellis, Jose Calderon and Devin Harris for most of the season. But there were improvements with the Knicks.

His shot looked better as he garnered more minutes (and his true shooting percentage shot up almost six full percentage points), though his accuracy from three-point range actually fell from 31.6 percent as a rookie to 30.2 percent in 2014-15. His floater game started to look more like what it did when he was a Hurricane. But the Knicks didn't run an offense conducive to his style.

Larkin looks best when he's prodding and dribbling around ball-screens. But the Knicks ran the fewest pick-and-rolls in the league, per Synergy Sports, and he looked out of touch within some of the schemes.

That won't be a problem in Brooklyn, where one of the criticisms of of Hollins' offense is that there is too much basic pick-and-roll.

"I talked to [general manager] Billy [King] and Lionel," Larkin told Alex Raskin of the Wall Street Journal. "They said they wanted me to come in, just play my game. I'm more of a pick-and-roll guy…For them to tell me they want me to come in, push the tempo, bring some energy to the team, I mean that's everything I wanted to hear."

Larkin will get his shot to run an offense more similar to the one he headed at Miami. It might not be for a ton of minutes, but he'll have a chance. And considering he's one of only two point guards on the roster (for now), he could see a playing-time increase from previous seasons if he plays well.

Two Point Guards; One Short

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Don't rule out two-point-guard lineups if Larkin performs capably early, too.

Jack has played plenty of 2 over the past few seasons with the New Orleans Pelicans, Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers, along with Brooklyn last year.

Lineups with Jack and Williams were an abject disaster last season. Opponents outscored Brooklyn by a calamitous 10.3 points per 100 possessions when the two of them shared the floor. But Hollins continued to rely upon that duo deep in the season.

That doesn't necessarily mean Jack can't play alongside a point guard with the Nets. The Williams/Jack combination, specifically, had no chemistry. Jack would dribble and D-Will would often hang around the corner, failing to cut, move, screen or find a way to get open. It was like the Nets were hiding him on offense, and the offense often looked like it was going four-on-five. 

It's too early so tell if the same thing will happen when Hollins plays this year's floor generals together, but it wouldn't be shocking to see Larkin get off to a surprisingly hot start. The league's best teams, like the San Antonio Spurs, test out as many different lineup combinations as possible throughout a season to get a feel for what works. The Nets may be best off doing the same.

Still, in the end, it's an underwhelming pairing.

Jack has his moments, but he's more suited for a backup role, an instant-offense position which doesn't require as much reliance as a starting one.

Kathy Willens/Associated Press

You can mask his inconsistency when he's not your No. 1 option. When he plays badly, just don't keep him in the game; when he's going well, leave him in. But the Nets no longer have that luxury.

At the very least, the Nets will hope that replacing D-Will's presence with Jack can have a positive overall reverberation within the organization, as Tim Bontemps wrote at the New York Post:

"

Everyone around the Nets, possibly even Jack himself, would concede the Nets are downgrading from a talent standpoint, going from Williams to Jack as the team’s starting point guard — a role the 31-year-old Jack seems certain to fill, even though he said he wouldn’t accept that as a certainty.

But the Nets are hoping any drop-off in talent that comes with agreeing to buy out the final two seasons of Williams’ contract will be balanced by an improvement in team chemistry, with everyone pulling in the same direction. That’s an area in which Jack, a veteran of 11 NBA seasons, should be a definite upgrade. His floor-general personality is more of what Nets coach Lionel Hollins is looking for.

"

Brooklyn's starting unit isn't too depleted on the whole. The point guards are just the weak spot.

Joe Johnson may be overpaid, but he is still a sufficient shooting guard. Bojan Bogdanovic showed at the end of the year he can be more than productive as a 3. Thaddeus Young and Brook Lopez, meanwhile, are the two best players on the squad. But point guard is shallow.

Either way, there has to be some transaction coming, whether it's a trade, signing or a waiver claim down the road. Brooklyn needs a third point guard, if only for insurance in case Larkin performs like he did with the Knicks or reverts to what he was with the Mavs.

In a best-case scenario, Jack does Jack things, Larkin takes a step forward and the point guard play is capable enough to help the Nets to a bottom-of-the-conference playoff seed.

But that's the best-case scenario. And to remedy the shakiest position on the roster, Brooklyn would be best suited discovering ways to score that don't include giving the ball to Jack or Larkin and saying, "Find a way to get me a bucket."

Perhaps Johnson adopts more facilitation responsibilities. He could play as the de facto point more often, like he did so well a couple of seasons ago. Brooklyn may increase its reliance upon an improved Bogdanovic. Maybe, if the Nets find themselves in a playoff race near the trade deadline, they could deal for a capable-but-not-great 1-guard, a Darren Collison type.

For now, though, Hollins is stuck trying to mend a rotation that's seemingly incomplete. Brooklyn will just have to live and die with its other four positions.

Follow Fred Katz on Twitter at @FredKatz.

All quotes obtained firsthand. All statistics courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com unless noted otherwise.