Winning may disguise a team’s shortcomings for a period of time, but there are instances when everyone already knows the deal.
Yeah, yeah: the Brooklyn Nets beat Atlanta on Monday night to continue in their quest to move forward in the playoffs. Yet, the winning of a single game hasn’t hidden a reality most already know about them — Brooklyn was built to win “now” a few years ago and the abomination of an organization is in its last throes to do anything relevant before another “new era” takes over.
While I am sure there will be some puff pieces today, explaining how gritty the Nets are for not giving up, this doesn’t change anything about how this team was built, and ultimately failed to live up to its own expectations.
When Mikhail Prokhorov (remember him?) bought the Nets, he had a goal in mind: Make Brooklyn a top-tier, no-longer-second-rate alternative for New York fans. Essentially, try to capitalize on the Knicks’ inability to succeed, and win over some younger fans. Well, that was supposedly the idea at the time. Nevertheless, the plan he enacted seemed about as dumb then as it does now. Regardless, at the time many people scooped it up because the Russian seemed like some free-wheeling, gun-toting, model-dating capitalist who would change the NBA.
The Nets didn’t think about any sort of long term solution to be the best New York franchise. Instead they had a “five-year plan”, which meant going after aging superstars, overpaying for guys who had obvious limitations, and more or less trying to win the city by winning the back pages of New York papers. Heck, they essentially put into place the same type of plan that has ravaged the Knicks for decades. It even worked, kind of, although the last time I checked, no fan base prefers getting a horrible pun on the back of the New York Post more than winning deep into the playoffs.
Unfortunately for Brooklyn fans, as well as whoever will be running the team for the immediate future, things are going to be bleak going forward. Thanks to the shortsightedness of an owner and those put in charge — with hindsight telling us it was so the team would be more appealing to future potential owners — the Nets are going to be on the hook to continue to have a roster filled with overpaid, untradeable assets.
Deron Williams will be owed an absurd $22,331,135 for the 2015-’16 season. That’s pretty bad considering Williams’ career has imploded since leaving Utah. Oh, and we haven’t even mentioned that the world’s foremost isolation player, Joe Johnson, will have $24,894,863 of his own headed his way next season.
I’m not great at the maths, but that’s over 47 million dollars shared by two guys who aren’t superstars. Even worse, at least for Williams, the 22 million going towards him is like putting your life savings on a ship that is quickly sinking. There’s nearly no return either player can give on the court that will help offset the losses that type of money will have on the salary-cap (pending CBA fun stuff).
To be fair, though, Brooklyn has gotten out of some wretched contracts before. The Nets managed to rid themselves of Paul Pierce and somehow got away from giving Gerald Wallace added loot as though he was as important to the franchise as a young player bursting onto the scene. Both players, while still proving value to other teams, were clearly not worth the money they were getting in Brooklyn — well, at least for a Nets team which wasn’t nearly as good as it thought it was.
I suppose I am getting a bit ahead of myself anyway. Brooklyn won a basketball game! Hooray! To be honest, and we should be honest with each other because we are friends, I can’t pretend to feel excited for that fan base no matter how many more meaningless wins the team manages to secure in the Atlanta series or beyond. Am I to pretend that the end of this era was anything other than a horror show because the Nets managed to not be a train wreck in the this playoff series?
Yay! Time to celebrate?
Tell me, please. What are the signs of glimmering hope for the Nets? Are such signs found in the brief moments of brilliance Williams showcases, as he did on Monday night? Could it be the — ahem — idea that Brook Lopez will develop into a superstar? Lord knows his trade value isn’t nearly as high as it was a few years ago.
Will “Iso” Joe Johnson use Paul Pierce’s interview that claimed he was too quiet and parlay that into a late-career surge of greatness? Or, more likely, will they all still be the same types of players they have always been, and this playoff run is their true last shot at doing anything of relevance in the buy-to-sell era of Prokhorov?
It is not lost on me that people will want to celebrate Brooklyn’s Game 4 win. Minimally, it might simply be ignored altogether since people know the endgame instead. I just know that celebrating it, for reasons lost on me, seems a bit silly considering the highlights of this Brooklyn era seem more synonymous with Jason Kidd spilling soda; enormous contracts being given to retirement home-type players; and an owner who convinced a city to tear itself down to build him an arena he will later use to help sell the team.
This is an actual thing I read from an AP post after Brooklyn’s win on Monday night: “Deron Williams finally delivered the game that’s expected of him, and he wasn’t going to let the Nets lose it.”
It is easy to say that, but let’s quickly step back for a moment: Was anyone expecting that game from Deron last night?
Expectations need to be framed and clarified — are we talking about present-moment expectations… or the expectations which accompanied the superstar-level money D-Will was initially given by an owner who spent like a drunken sailor? Seriously, was that the game anyone actually expects Williams to deliver anymore? Is this the world will live in, one where we act as though the obvious negatives — accumulated over several years and lingering into next season — should be ignored for a few fleeting moments of brilliance in a playoff run that almost surely won’t get very far?
Yes, the series is tied at two and who knows, stranger things have happened, maybe the Nets can steal this series. However, if the endgame of this horribly shortsighted Brooklyn organization was to be an eight-seed which upsets a one (oh, and to sell it), then congratulations Nets management, you might do it… Your dreams have been realized! You tricked the world, for one series, into thinking anything you have done over the last few years has bordered on barely competent, and you still get to sell your team.
Maybe this was the Nets’ five-year plan, anyway. It could be that I am going too hard on a team which is playing decently enough in the playoffs. I could see the managment meeting now in 2009:
“In a few years we are going to move the team to Brooklyn,” said the wild, fun-loving Russian. “We will convince everyone that we will win an NBA title within five years. THEN, in our sixth-year of ineptitude, we will be an eight-seed, with a roster comprised of what-could-have-beens, never-weres, and used-to-bes, and trick some people into thinking we care.”
Pop the champagne bottles, Brooklyn management and other NBA owners who “vetted” the Russian billionaire. You tricked a few people into thinking anything you do positively has an ounce of relevance in the NBA because you won two games in the first round of an NBA playoff series. Well done. Well done, indeed.
