When the Brooklyn Nets fired head coach Lionel Hollins and reassigned general manager Billy King in January 2016, with the team en route to a 21-61 finish, I wrote that the Nets' failed win-now strategy could turn the organization into "an albatross for years to come."
It was easy to see why I was so pessimistic. Because of a 2013 trade with the Boston Celtics, Brooklyn was poised to send multiple lottery picks to Boston without reaping any of the rewards for all the losing the Nets were about to do. That's exactly what happened. Brooklyn's pick came up No. 3 in 2016, No. 1 overall in 2017 and No. 8 in 2018. All the Nets had to show for it was the 27th pick in 2017, swapped from the Celtics.
Yet three-plus years later, Brooklyn isn't the hopeless franchise I envisioned back then. Remarkably, the Nets have made it back to the postseason. And while that playoff run might come to a relatively quick end Tuesday if Brooklyn loses Game 5 of its first-round series with the Philadelphia 76ers, the Nets are poised to continue improving with one of the league's youngest rotations. They also could create max salary-cap space this summer to add a veteran star to the mix.
Suddenly, Brooklyn's future appears bright rather than bleak. Should accomplishing that turnaround without the benefit of the lottery make us rethink the need to automatically give the best draft picks to the worst teams?
Nets had to get creative to add talent
What GM Sean Marks, head coach Kenny Atkinson and the Brooklyn organization have accomplished over the past three years looks all the more remarkable in the context of the lottery rewards the Nets didn't have.
Even if we count the pick they got back from Boston via the 2017 pick swap, Brooklyn gave up more valuable picks, according to my draft value chart, than all but seven teams made in total over that span -- and more than twice as valuable as the picks the Nets actually made the past three years (worth 4,090 points).
*Picks assigned to team who got the player after trades on or shortly after draft night
Fortunately, Brooklyn did still have a few assets when Marks was hired as GM in February 2016. He was able to extract value for the quality players in their prime the Nets did have, while also taking advantage of their most plentiful resource: cap space.
Ahead of the 2016 draft, Marks agreed to send veteran forward Thaddeus Young to the Indiana Pacers for the No. 20 pick, used on Caris LeVert. Brooklyn snagged another first-round pick in 2017, ultimately No. 22 (used on Jarrett Allen), at that year's trade deadline by sending forward Bojan Bogdanovic to the Washington Wizards and taking back the onerous contract of forward Andrew Nicholson. (Nicholson, swapped to the Portland Trail Blazers for wing Allen Crabbe in a rare Marks misstep, was subsequently waived and has played the past two seasons in China.)
The Nets added a third first-round pick in the summer of 2017, getting both a first and a second in 2018 from the Toronto Raptors to swallow the contract of forward DeMarre Carroll and help Toronto create payroll flexibility. As a rookie, second-rounder Rodions Kurucs has started and been a bigger contributor than first-round pick Dzanan Musa. And Carroll has been a solid, veteran presence off the bench.
Brooklyn's most important move, however, actually required giving up another first-round pick -- the one from the Boston swap, No. 27 in 2017 -- as well as longtime starting center Brook Lopez and taking on the remaining three years and $48 million on the contract of center Timofey Mozgov from the Los Angeles Lakers. (The Nets subsequently were able to get out of Mozgov's contract a year earlier by a shrewd swap for the more expensive expiring contract of Dwight Howard, who agreed to a buyout.)
In exchange, Brooklyn got the best prospect possibly available via trade: point guard D'Angelo Russell, the No. 2 overall pick in 2015 who would be unseated when the Lakers drafted Lonzo Ball days later. The Nets gambled that Russell, just 21 at the time of the trade, could still develop into the star point guard scouts anticipated coming out of Ohio State.
That's precisely what happened this season, with Russell becoming Brooklyn's first All-Star since Joe Johnson in 2014. He's flanked in the starting lineup for this series by two other Nets picks acquired by Marks via trade (Allen and either Kurucs or LeVert, who moved back into the starting lineup for Game 4).
Is Brooklyn's success replicable?
It's worth pausing here to note that the Nets had to nail just about every draft pick and trade they made to accomplish such a quick rebuild. It also required strong player development. Atkinson's coaching staff helped turn guards Spencer Dinwiddie and Joe Harris, both waived by their previous teams, into key contributors who have logged a combined 58 minutes per game in this series after signing lucrative long-term contracts.
In a world where every lottery team was trying to follow Brooklyn's blueprint, duplicating that success might be difficult if not impossible. Such a world would probably also create more competition for the kind of money-related deals that were crucial for the Nets, since other teams would have additional motivation to supplement their more meager draft picks.
It's also important to note that Brooklyn doesn't exactly serve as an antidote for the kind of aggressive rebuilding Philadelphia famously underwent with former GM Sam Hinkie. After all, even without any incentive whatsoever to lose games after dealing away their picks, the Nets still went a combined 69-177 between 2015-16 and 2017-18. Only the Phoenix Suns won fewer games over that span, and Brooklyn edged them by a single victory. So if you're looking for a story of a team rebuilding without bottoming out, the Nets surely aren't that.
From the NBA's perspective, the financial piece of the equation is worth considering, and it's not encouraging. Brooklyn ranked last in the league with an announced average attendance of 14,941 this season -- slightly fewer fans than the Nets averaged in 2015-16, when they lost 61 games. Attendance usually lags success because of the importance of season-ticket holders, but it took Brooklyn fans until mid-March to jump on the bandwagon. The Nets then announced sellouts of their final five regular-season games and both so far in the playoffs.
Last, Brooklyn is still relatively low on the star power necessary to truly contend in the NBA. Russell, the Nets' best player, was selected to the All-Star Game only as a replacement for the injured Victor Oladipo and wouldn't have been in the discussion if he played in the more loaded Western Conference. As a product of their time in the lottery, the Sixers have two players (Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons) ranked higher in our top 25 under 25 rankings than Russell (tied for 13th on that list). Also ahead of Russell: one of the players the Celtics ultimately added via a pick acquired from Brooklyn, Jayson Tatum.
Those caveats noted, the Nets still represent an exception that shouldn't be possible if high draft picks are truly necessary for losing teams to rebuild. And that has caused me to rethink my position on the lottery. Whether directly or via lottery, giving top picks to bad teams creates all sorts of problems for the NBA -- specifically teams tanking either part of a season or, in the case of the 76ers, multiple seasons in order to collect promising young talent via the draft. Nobody wants that, but defenders of the status quo (a group I've vocally been part of) have pointed out that it's necessary to give these losing teams a chance to eventually compete and their fans reason for hope.
I'll concede I'm no longer certain that's actually true. Perhaps a version of "the wheel" proposed by Celtics assistant GM Mike Zarren to assign picks using a fixed rotation over time could make sense for the NBA. In a league in which a handful of teams have found it difficult to escape the lottery even with repeated injections of talented prospects, maybe encouraging teams to follow Brooklyn's lead is a better idea.