The Brooklyn Nets may be walking straight into the one thing the new lottery reform is designed to punish: losing without much reward.
With the league’s updated lottery rules set to make life tougher for bottom-tier teams, ESPN analyst Ben Golliver said Brooklyn’s path back to relevance could get even rougher. Under the new setup, the three teams with the worst overall records will have fewer lottery balls and slimmer odds of landing a top-four pick or the No. 1 selection.
That matters for a Nets team projected to win 18 games next season, which would be two fewer than last year. It matters even more because Brooklyn does not control its own first-round pick; Houston owns swap rights from a 2024 offseason trade.
General manager Sean Marks has tried to thread the needle by building a roster that can compete without fully locking the Nets into another dead-end season. He traded for Julius Randle, signed Keon Ellis and Moritz Wagner, and drafted Mikel Brown Jr., Joshua Jefferson and Tyler Bilodeau. Between those additions and veterans like Randle and Michael Porter Jr., Brooklyn looks too deep to bottom out the way some rebuilding teams do.
That leaves the real question hanging over the season: how many wins can Randle and Porter generate, and will that be enough to keep Marks from chasing another major swing for a superstar?
Golliver thinks the answer may be familiar. In his view, the Nets could grow impatient with another rebuilding cycle and pivot back to an all-in move, the same kind of shortcut they’ve taken before. Brooklyn, he argued, keeps ending up in the same loop.
The franchise’s history backs that up. Former general manager Billy King sent Keith Bogans, MarShon Brooks, Kris Humphries, Kris Joseph, Gerald Wallace, a 2014 first-round pick, a 2016 first-round pick, a 2017 first-round pick swap and a 2018 first-round pick to the Boston Celtics in the 2013 deal for Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Jason Terry, D.J. White and a 2017 second-round pick.
That trade came with a premium price, and the Nets were betting on proven names. Pierce was 36 and Garnett was 37, but both were one-time NBA champions after beating the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2008 NBA Finals. King clearly valued that kind of playoff pedigree, and he also brought in Nets legend Jason Kidd to coach the team.
The results did not immediately justify the cost of all those first-round picks.
Marks later made his own superstar splash in the 2019 offseason, landing Kevin Durant in a sign-and-trade and Kyrie Irving as a free agent. That move followed the same basic Brooklyn pattern: get tired of the rebuild, chase stars, and try to leapfrog the long road.
If the Nets do not show real progress and the new lottery rules make it harder to build through the draft, history suggests another blockbuster could be waiting.
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Nets Fans Just Got A Reminder About One Recent Roster Cut
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For the Nets, the more familiar name in the shuffle is Malachi Smith, who was recently waived in Brooklyn and now appears headed to Toronto on a two-way contract. It is the kind of transaction that can happen in a blink around the league, but it also serves as a snapshot of just how competitive the margins are for players trying to stick on an NBA roster. [Read more 🡒]