The Brooklyn Nets head into the 2026-27 season with a strange kind of pressure: they need their rookie point guard to matter, and they need the team to stay competitive enough to keep a dangerous draft situation from getting worse.
That’s the tightrope Brooklyn is walking after an active offseason pushed the roster from clear rebuild mode into something more interesting. This is a group that should be better than a 20-win team, which changes the conversation immediately. Now the question is what success actually looks like.
For Anthony Puccio, host of "The Brooklyn Pod," the answer isn’t either/or. It’s both.
"He (Brown) needs to show that he's, at least, in the conversation," Puccio said. "And the Nets need to compete or be in the conversation for the play-in."
At the center of all of this is Mikel Brown Jr., the No. 6 overall pick and Brooklyn’s bet to become the point guard of the future. The Nets brought him in after meeting with him three times during the pre-draft process, and they’re counting on him to grow into that role quickly.
The Rookie of the Year race won’t make that easy. This class comes loaded with top-end talent, with AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, Cam Boozer and Caleb Wilson all viewed as the consensus top-four picks. Brown has a real fight on his hands if he wants to push his way into that award discussion.
Still, he made a strong early impression in Las Vegas Summer League. Dutch Gaitley, Brooklyn’s summer league coach, challenged him to find his offense while playing alongside second-year guard Egor Dëmin and to make his presence felt defensively.
Brown answered by getting skinny on screens, navigating them effectively, blocking shots and jumping passing lanes for quick steals. The defensive pop was a notable step forward from what he was known for in college.
The team’s bigger-season goal is tied to the standings as much as the development of its young guards. Brooklyn has to avoid giving Houston a chance to swap into a lottery spot because of the 2027 first-round pick swap from the 2021 James Harden trade.
The new lottery reform makes that even more important. Teams with the fourth- through 10th-worst records get more lottery balls, which improves their odds at the No. 1 pick. Brooklyn also can’t sink into the bottom three, since that would leave it with fewer lottery balls and worse odds.
In other words, every game matters from opening night to the finish.
Puccio pointed to one more piece that could shape whether this season counts as a step forward: one of Brooklyn’s other four 2025 first-round picks has to become a rotation player. Dëmin flashed improved downhill scoring over the summer, but the others didn’t show much.
Nolan Traoré and Ben Saraf also need to make real progress. Brooklyn doesn’t have a backup point guard behind Brown, and Jordi Fernández gave both players major ball-handling duties in the second half of the season.
So the Nets aren’t just trying to be better. They’re trying to thread a needle: develop Brown, get meaningful production from the rest of the young group, and stay out of the kind of record range that would make the Houston situation even more complicated.
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For Brooklyn, the move says as much about roster management as it does about Smith. The Nets have been sorting through options and staying nimble with their contract spots, while Toronto now carries a crowded group with 20 players under contract. Smiths next opportunity appears to be tied to camp competition, which gives him another chance to stick but also leaves his place far from settled. [Read more 🡒]
New York Liberty Hit Another Rough Stretch Fans Cant Ignore
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The bigger concern may have come in the middle of it all, when Jonquel Jones went down with an ankle injury before returning to the bench by halftime. There was no serious update after the game, leaving another layer of uncertainty around a stretch that already has fans looking for answers. For a Liberty team that has enough talent to change the feel of a night quickly, the question now is whether the effort in the second half can become something more lasting once the injury picture becomes clearer. [Read more 🡒]