Tuesday 2 July 2019 11:48, UK
Over three years, Brooklyn Nets GM Sean Marks and head coach Kenny Atkinson have successfully executed a patient long-term team-building plan that has resulted in the free-agent signings of superstars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. Mark Deeks examines the Nets' journey.
What do you do when you are at the bottom with very little help on hand to get you back to the top? You aim for the stars, of course.
Left relatively destitute by the ill-founded July 2013 deal with the Boston Celtics that saw them mortgage their future for the past-their-prime years of Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, the Brooklyn Nets hit the very bottom of the NBA - not just amongst the league's very worst records, but also with one of the lowest incumbent talent levels, and without the control of their draft picks to be able to remedy that.
The only upside to the situation was that it would one day end. At that point, almost every roster spot was available both for player tryouts, reclamation projects from busted first-round picks from other teams, and for salary dumps with assets attached from those higher up the food chain in need of relief.
The fact that the Nets had nothing gave them possibilities, in a way; they had leverage of no pressure and no urgent expectations that allowed them to patiently accumulate assets.
But they also had nothing and being relatively good-natured in a crisis should not obscure that. It was a crisis.
There was no short-term solution to Brooklyn's situation, and indeed, it was the impatient pursuit of the short-term that got them in the situation in the first place.
What this meant in practice was that long-term commitments could and would be given to whoever the new general manager and head coaches of the future were deemed to be.
Sean Marks was hired in his first GM role in February 2016 to run the office side of things, signing a four-year contract; rarely is a four-year contract actually that long in this high-turnover position, and save for those with the benefit of implicit tenure, executives normally have short leases.
Nevertheless, Marks has been in Brooklyn ever since, and after eight months, he was able to hire the coach he wanted in Kenny Atkinson, who also remains to this day.
Over that time, Atkinson has been trying to instil defensive principles to define the team in the future, while Marks has been working to build that team of the future.
With very few players with any value to trade off when he arrived, Marks approached the herculean task with a multi-pronged yet fairly simply formula; get what he could from what he had, leverage the salary cap flexibility brought about by the fact that almost no one on the incumbent roster was worth paying, get some draft picks from other teams and hope to strike it lucky in free agency with the oft-overlooked types.
Successes came in the forms of D'Angelo Russell and Spencer Dinwiddie.
Russell was acquired in exchange for Brook Lopez - one of the few players on the team Marks inherited with any positive value on the trade market - and the first-round pick subsequently used on Kyle Kuzma.
The Nets were able to get the first round pick latterly used on Caris LeVert in exchange for Thaddeus Young, a truly win-win trade if ever there was one, and then were able to get another first-round pick (subsequently used to draft Jarrett Allen) from the Washington Wizards in exchange for a mere part-season of Bojan Bogdanovic. That one, the Nets clearly won in a landslide.
One small blip in the process was the trading for Allen Crabbe from the Portland Trail Blazers. The beneficiary of an absolutely enormous contract in 2016 free agency despite being a fairly marginal player prior, Crabbe had not gotten much better or more productive, yet it was the Nets who gave him that enormous offer sheet that was later matched by Portland.
When given the opportunity to trade for him on that matched deal a year later, they did so; Crabbe however got less productive over the course of the deal, and has had to be pawned off to the Atlanta Hawks along with a first-round pick this summer, the opposite of the Nets' usual front office MO.
Normally, as evidenced in the trades for Kenneth Faried and others, they are on the receiving end of those deals. The fact however that the Crabbe deal stands alone as their solitary bad one speaks to the general overall effectiveness of this strategy.
Along with hitting some big wins in 'redraft' candidates (ie picking up discarded recently-drafted players) such as Dinwiddie and Joe Harris, the Nets made incremental progress across the duration of the Marks and Atkinson era to the point that they made the playoffs this season, despite LeVert missing huge chunks of it through injury and not looking himself upon returning.
In adding capable veterans to the aforementioned youth talent in the forms of Ed Davis and Jared Dudley, the Nets sought to build a balanced roster, balanced on both offense and defense, in both experience and upside, in both frontcourt and backcourt, and with depth at every position.
They were not going to compete for a title this season or indeed in any future season as constructed, but without forgoing the larger roster construction plan, they were going to compete for the playoffs, get a competitive vibe going within the team, stir the fan base, perhaps nick a series win and make the team an enviable place to come to.
And then the larger roster construction plan would come into effect this summer, when they would have double maximum salary cap space in a summer where the available talent was worth spending it on.
It could not have worked out much better. The Nets finished above .500 this past regular season, finishing with a 42-40 record and the sixth-overall seed in the Eastern Conference.
They competed in their first-round series against the Philadelphia 76ers, losing only when the Joel Embiid disadvantage proved insurmountable, winning the admiration of the neutral in the process.
Now this week, they remedied the only big errors of the Marks era, moved Crabbe to Atlanta, opened up the space, and now have secured commitments to sign as free agents from both Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, two of the biggest names on the market.
There is no talent dearth any longer.
Feel free to explore whether the resultant core of Irving, Durant, Harris, Allen, LeVert, Dinwiddie et al could be one of a contender.
Feel free to debate whether the concurrent addition of DeAndre Jordan - who signed for four years and $40m as a close friend of Durant's - is justified considering his much-decreased production on the court over the past two seasons.
Feel free to debate quite how the team can close up to contendership going forward when so much of their salary cap flexibility is tied up in these three players and Durant's status going forward remains so unclear. That bit is all subjective.
The objective truth is this - the Nets started with nothing, they've still got most of it left, and now they have two All-Stars to show for it.
There are multiple ways to build teams, and while no one would ever wish to start from the starting point that Marks had to, almost everyone would love to be in the situation he is now in.
