Billy King Getting Rare 2nd Chance to Remake Brooklyn Nets

The Brooklyn Nets dug themselves a hole. At least they're not trying crawl out of it using the same tools.

The Nets dealt draft pick after draft pick to land the aging Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry back in the summer of 2013. They previously did the same to take on Joe Johnson, whose contract had been labeled as "untradable" almost immediately after ink hit the paper on it. It wasn't.

Now, RealGM indicates the team may not use its own selection on draft night until 2019 because of pick swaps and unprotected giveaways. And it just went through a stretch in which it had to deplete its roster in order to gain some amount of salary-cap flexibility.

No one out there envies Brooklyn general manager Billy King.

Still, Billy King is the sixth-longest-tenured general manager in the Eastern Conference. Even after all the mistakes, owner Mikhail Prokhorov has kept him around.

In some ways, it's impossible to judge exactly how much of the Pierce/Garnett trade was on him. Clearly, ownership pushed for it coming off a 49-win season during which it thought it was closer to a championship than it actually was.

That's not to excuse all of the blame from King, but it should relieve some of the fault—even if it's just a smidgen. 

Fans have called for King's head.

After all the mistakes, after all the dealt picks and assets, after all the money brought into Brooklyn, he is still hanging around the Nets and running the show. But maybe there's something to be said for that.

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The NBA world tends to be unforgiving. That's not just true for the Association, either. It happens in all sports.

Make a series of small mistakes, and you're usually gone. Make one big one, and it can cost you your job after just a year or two in the office.

It almost feels like King is new in Brooklyn—he got there in just 2010—but six years is an eternity in that profession. Even though he's made questionable decision after questionable decision, he's endured. He's survived.

His time with the Philadelphia 76ers was similar. He spent years playing the diminishing returns game with veterans until ownership eventually ousted him. The positive constant between his time in Philly and Brooklyn? He's had an eye for talent in the draft. His mistakes usually come in free agency or with bigger trades.

There could be value in keeping around someone who's made those errors. After all, GMs are people, too.

When a young player gets better as his career progresses, we give him some daps for improving. But we rarely ever give GMs—or even coaches—the same treatment, probably because it's hard to see it in statistics.

Someone like 23-year-old Orlando Magic forward Tobias Harris goes from 25 to 36 percent from three, and it's easy for us to say, "That dude learned how to shoot." But when a GM gets better or even changes philosophically, it takes more observation than a number just getting higher.

So, where does King fit into all of this? Well, after all these cap-strapping moves, it does seem like he is evolving.

Gerry Broome/Associated Press

He's not the best GM in the league and doesn't deserve praise just yet, but we should at least start to take notice of a change.

That's it. Not a betterment yet. Just a change.

The series of moves King has made over the past 14 months or so shows a separate mentality from the one that would lead to the Johnson trade or the Pierce/K.G. one. He's going after cheap, raw, young, athletic players—often versatile wings who, in a best-case scenario, can turn into adaptable defenders.

"You look at Golden State," King said last month. "They can throw [Andre] Iguodala out there. They can throw other guys out there."

Markel Brown fits that young, athletic, defensive-minded description. So did Cory Jefferson before the Nets waived him on Monday afternoon. But the list doesn't just stop with the team's 2014 second-round selections:

• There was the Thaddeus Young trade—he came over from the Minnesota Timberwolves at the deadline for Garnett—possibly the best swap King has ever facilitated.
• There was the Rondae Hollis-Jefferson draft-night deal.
• Or the Chris McCullough pick.
• Or the Thomas Robinson signing.
• Or even flipping Steve Blake (acquired along with RHJ from the Portland Trail Blazers) for Quincy Miller, whose contract isn't guaranteed, but who will get a chance to make an overpacked roster in training camp.

Craig Ruttle/Associated Press

Obviously, none of those guys is bound to become the next Iggy, who was one of the NBA's most underappreciated players until he won Finals MVP a month ago.

And even if King was boxed into a corner—as if he were using his own gloves to punch himself in the face and push himself up against the ropes alone—he did decide to remedy the situation with low financial risks.

None of those guys are expensive—not that the Nets were in a fiscally flexible enough situation to throw big money on the table anyway.

But if one or two of these players pans out—if Brown learns how to shoot, Hollis-Jefferson becomes a Michael Kidd-Gilchrist type (hyphen and all) or Robinson realizes all he needs to do is grab offensive-rebound scraps and outmuscle guys on defense to become a back-end rotation player—then the Nets have the beginnings of a foundation moving forward.

There isn't much King could do to help Brooklyn improve on its 38 wins from 2014-15—especially with the organization's objective to get under the luxury-tax line, which it did successfully when it bought out Deron Williams over the weekend.

So, King has to go in a more nuanced route.

It might not work, but in the end, Nets fans should at least be encouraged that their GM is showing off some new tricks inside the more constricting walls of the 2015 Nets.

Follow Fred Katz on Twitter at @FredKatz.

All quotes obtained firsthand.