The Brooklyn Nets didn’t make the playoffs as they had in 2015, but this was nevertheless a fairly typical season for the organization.
Brook Lopez was discussed as the subject of possible trades, but stayed put.
Mikhail Prokhorov didn’t look very smart.
The season ended with everyone feeling pretty depressed, with not a lot of long-term optimism inside the Barclays Center.
The patterns were all too familiar for anyone who has followed the Nets over the years. The organization took advantage of a very weak Eastern Conference to stack together consecutive NBA Finals appearances. Other than those two years — in which Byron Scott coached in June (yes, it happened — it really did) — the Nets have very little else to present to their fan base as the marker of a franchise which “gets it.” That’s very rarely been the case, regardless of the organization’s home base — formerly The Meadowlands, now an updated pleasure palace called Barclays.
As the Nets enter the offseason, no one should entertain fanciful notions of a playoff berth 12 months from now, in April of 2017. It would be hard to imagine that both the Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards will miss the playoffs two straight years. Moreover, it is difficult to wrap the mind around the belief that neither the Orlando Magic nor the Milwaukee Bucks will make any progress next season. The Eastern Conference might not be a stacked conference loaded with top-end quality and heft, but the East definitely moved in the direction of respectability this season. The number of bad teams decreased. The number of “not great but at least decent” teams increased.
The Nets were not one of those teams. They are buried near the bottom of the league, and they’ll need more than the 2017 season to climb out of their unenviable position.
It’s their owner’s fault, also the fault of former general manager Billy King.
The Mikhail Prokhorov-Billy King era was a time of misguided decisions. It was a period marked by chasing aging but expensive stars, creating win-now-or-else expectations without expanding the time window in which the Nets could be taken seriously as contenders. The Prokhorov-King tandem tried to go all-in at the poker table without concern for the consequences if the gamble failed. The Nets engaged in short-term thinking at its worst, and what’s especially galling about the previous few years is that their reliance on older veterans left the organization without ample roster pieces which could then serve as foundations for the future.
The Nets didn’t spend with the future in mind, but they didn’t even construct their roster with and eye toward the next four or five years.
This was enough of a disaster and a waste of a lot of time and money. The team won one game in the second round of the playoffs, climbing no higher than that… and mortgaged its future in the process.
Then, Prokhorov decided to waste more time and money this past season. He fired coach Lionel Hollins in the midst of a season which never had any real chance of succeeding in the first place.
The one remotely encouraging development to emerge from this mess is that King was finally removed from the general manager’s chair. Sean Marks, formerly the assistant general manager for R.C. Buford in San Antonio with the Spurs, might be able to chart a new course, one which should involve a complete rebuild in which the Nets save money now and aim for the stars in the future, not the present tense.
We’ll see what Marks does, but the more pertinent question is whether Prokhorov — a notoriously impatient man — will have the patience to let Marks put his plan together.
We’ve just seen the Philadelphia 76ers and Josh Harris fail to let Sam Hinkie carry out his full plan for the restoration of that organization. You will note that the Boston Celtics and Toronto Raptors have patiently allowed their coaches and rosters to develop over time. In marked contrast, the 76ers, Nets, and also the New York Knicks — who fired Derek Fisher midway through this season instead of giving him time to develop with his team — have not displayed an ounce of patience.
You can do the math in the Atlantic Division: The two patient franchises are winning and headed for the playoffs, very possibly the second round or better. The three impatient franchises are stuck, rooted in a world of hurt.
One can slice and dice the Nets’ issues in so many ways, but it all comes down to Prokhorov needing to get the heck out of the way and allow his GM to do what he sees fit. If Sean Marks is given the time and space he needs, he has to start over in Brooklyn, the bitter but necessary medicine this organization must digest after indulging in an excess of caviar, sweets and alcohol the past several years.
