Michael Porter Jr. doesn’t seem interested in shrinking the conversation around the Nets. On N3on’s stream, when asked whether Brooklyn could win 50 games this season, Porter answered simply: “Yeah, I do.”
That kind of belief sounds bold for a team that won 20 games last season, but Porter isn’t alone in talking big. Julius Randle has been pushing the same message in his own way. He told rookie Mikel Brown Jr. the Nets were going to “shock the world,” and on Sept. 12 at the Brooklyn Basketball Training Center, he stood by it.
“Exactly that,” Randle said when reporters asked what he meant. “Whatever your expectations are, whatever expectations that are put upon us, we’re going to exceed them and we’re going to do things at a very high level.”
Brown took that phrase and gave it a sharper edge after the draft, when Brooklyn introduced him with Joshua Jefferson and Tyler Bilodeau.
“We’re going to shock the world with our competitiveness,” Brown said, describing his conversation with Randle. “Trying to bring back that winning culture that Brooklyn Nets once had, this Nets organization once had.”
The hard part is obvious. Brooklyn’s win total at BetMGM sits at 24.5, and getting all the way to 50 would mean climbing 30 games in one season - the kind of jump that sits near the extreme end of NBA history. The Nets haven’t reached 50 wins since the 2001-02 New Jersey team went 52-30 and made the NBA Finals.
Still, there is a basketball case for optimism, and it starts with fit. Porter has already pictured one of the ways it could work: Randle driving, help collapsing, Porter standing ready on the arc for a catch-and-shoot look. That kind of sequence is the basic building block of a better offense.
And Brooklyn needs one badly. Last season, the Nets finished last in the NBA in paint shooting and 3-point percentage, and 28th from midrange.
No other team landed in the bottom five in all three categories. Their offense ranked 30th.
Randle and Porter give the Nets two established scorers who might actually help one another. Randle averaged 21.1 points, 6.7 rebounds and five assists in 79 games for the Minnesota Timberwolves last season.
Porter put up a career-high 24.2 points, 7.1 rebounds and three assists in a larger role for Brooklyn. ESPN ranked Randle 54th and Porter 60th in its preseason NBA Top 100.
The numbers suggest more than just two names that can score. Over the past seven seasons, Randle ranks fourth in the NBA in assists leading to 3-pointers, trailing only Nikola Jokić, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Luka Dončić.
That matters because Porter spent last season playing in an offense that often left him without much breathing room. Only 9% of his 3-point attempts were classified as wide open, the lowest share among 307 players who took at least 100 threes.
“We understand each other’s games really well and how we can really complement each other,” Randle told reporters. “We’re two guys that obviously can both really score the ball, but we do it in very different ways.”
That’s the heart of Brooklyn’s case. Randle’s drives can drag defenders into the paint.
Porter can then punish the rotation if the ball gets kicked back out. It’s not the kind of possession that guarantees a 30-win jump, but it’s the sort of thing that can nudge an offense out of the cellar if enough of it starts happening.
Of course, 50 wins would demand much more than two scorers finding good rhythm together. The young core has to matter too, and Porter pointed to that group when he talked about why he believes in the Nets.
Egor Dëmin offers the clearest evidence so far. As a teenager last season, he averaged 10.3 points and 3.3 assists, shot 38.5% from deep and made 124 3-pointers before plantar fasciitis ended his year.
He was the only player from Brooklyn’s five-man first-round class to receive an All-Rookie vote. The next step is whether he can create when defenders run him off the line, because if he starts getting into the paint more often, his passing becomes another weapon.
Mikel Brown Jr. brings a different kind of pressure. The No. 6 pick can handle the ball or play next to another guard, giving Brooklyn another downhill creator. But he hasn’t played a minute in the league yet, and how fast his game translates is one of the season’s biggest unknowns.
The rest of the group has questions too. Noah Clowney has shown flashes as a floor-spacing big without putting it all together across a full season.
Nolan Traoré, Danny Wolf and the other young pieces still have to earn their roles. Porter’s vision only works if several of those players take real steps forward, and quickly.
There’s also the issue on defense, where the Nets took a hit in the trade that brought Randle to Brooklyn. Nic Claxton went to the Chicago Bulls, removing an established anchor in the middle. That leaves Day’Ron Sharpe with a major opportunity in starter minutes.
Over the last three seasons, Brooklyn has outscored opponents by 0.4 points per 100 possessions with Sharpe on the floor and been outscored by nine per 100 with him off it. But most of that work came against bench units. Doing it against starters is a different challenge altogether.
If Sharpe can hold up, Brooklyn has a path to improvement without bleeding too much on the other end. If he can’t, the gains elsewhere could get wiped out quickly.
Last season’s record leaves no room for fantasy. The Nets went 20-62 with a minus-10.3 net rating, second worst in the league.
That was a 20-win team in every meaningful sense. Even getting to 30 wins would require a real shift.
So the realistic case is modest even if the talk is not. Brooklyn has two proven scorers, a potentially cleaner offensive fit, some young talent that might level up, and a chance for Sharpe to carve out a bigger role. That’s enough to argue for progress.
It is not enough to promise 50.
Brown’s version of the message was smaller, and maybe that’s the point.
“And it’s going to take day by day, step by step,” he said, “just getting 1% better every day.”
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