By Jordan Hamel

What if I told you there’s a New Zealander turning heads in the NBA and his name isn’t Steven Adams? He isn’t anchoring a struggling OKC Thunder, he doesn’t look like a Dothraki Blood Rider and he hasn’t even played a competitive game of basketball in six years. It’s Brooklyn Nets GM and renowned bargain-hunter Sean Marks. He’s spent the last year mining the NBA’s scrapheap for hidden treasures and he’s starting to get a reputation.

Auckland-native Marks had an unremarkable NBA career as a player, averaging under 10 minutes and 3 points per game during his journeyman-esque 12 years in the league. Marks cut short his retirement, presumably spent sailing the Bay of Islands with Pero Cameron, to accept a four year offer to helm the Brooklyn Nets, a bottom-feeding franchise still crippled by a bad decision made nearly five years ago.

Back in the days of Marks’ predecessor, Billy King, the Nets mortgaged their entire future for a shot at the title. They traded away three future first round draft picks, the last of which was used by Boston to acquire flat-earther Kyrie Irving and will be conveyed this year.  Plus the rights to swap picks in the most recent draft, giving an already stacked Boston third-pick Jayson Tatum, in exchange for the withered corpses of Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. What was supposed to be the birth of an NBA dynasty led to years of failure and disappointment for Brooklyn with no immediate hope of a rebirth.  

So with no future picks in sight, minimal amounts of talent or young prospects, Nets owner and Bond villain Mikhail Prokhorov decided that the only remedy for his failing franchise was a bit of No.8 wire ingenuity. It may have been the best decision he’s ever made as owner. Kiwis turned reduced cream and onion soup powder in a national delicacy; surely Rangitoto College’s finest could turn this dumpster fire into a basketball team? 

Marks became like the Weka, Aotearoa’s most lovable urban scavenger, picking up the scraps and unwanted parts from other teams and polishing them and seeing if they shine.  While Brooklyn didn’t have any stars or draft picks when Marks came on board, what they did have was a boatload of salary cap space. He let the league know they could dump their bloated, unwanted contracts on the Nets - for a price. That price was young players who hadn’t lived up to their potential, low value picks and anything else Marks could get his wandering claws on. 

Within a year Marks had acquired D’Angelo Russell, collateral damage of the Lakers’ fascination with Lonzo Ball. Russell is currently averaging over 20 points and five assists per game, posting the first positive Player Efficiency Rating of his career (19.4 before his recent injury) and looking like the versatile scoring guard the Lakers thought he was when they drafted him second overall.

While Russell is the prime example of what can happen when you take those kinds of risks, Marks’ short tenure has been filled with small scale reclamation projects. Whether it’s a talented but injury prone college star (Caris LeVert), a G League battler who was never given a shot on the big stage (Sean Kilpatrick), or even a post-post-Linsanity Jeremy Lin. While the rest of the league was busy handing out onerous long term contracts to mediocre players, Marks was getting his hands dirty, sifting through the trash and the leftovers finding talent where other people couldn’t.

This week Marks emerged from what could be his biggest salvage mission yet; sending veteran Trevor Booker to Philadelphia for former third pick Jahlil Okafor, eighth pick Nik Stauskas and a future second round pick. The disappointing Stauskas still has a chance to be a rotation level player in the NBA if he can consistently drain the three-ball, what he was renowned for at college, but it’s Okafor who offers the most upside here. 

Drafted by Philly during their process trusting days, Okafor had a reputation as a flawed player. He couldn’t rebound or defend at the rim and he was a ball stopper on offense, he was the classic back to the basket big man who the modern NBA game had left behind. 

Despite all the criticism there was still enough intrigue in his polished offensive post moves and scoring to take him third ahead of Latvian unicorn Kristaps Porzingis. Okafor managed to fill up the box score in his first year in the league, averaging over 17 points and 7 rebounds for a terrible Sixers team. But the bad still out-weighed the good, and with the crowded frontcourt the Sixers had, Okafor got buried on the bench.  The situation became so toxic that a ‘Free Jah’ movement was started in an attempt to get Okafor traded to a new team that would give him a chance. 

Well, thanks to curious Sean and his sticky fingers Jah has been freed. While there’s no certainty that Okafor will fulfill his potential in Brooklyn, he’ll have the chance to prove that he can still be useful in a league that doesn’t value his skillset anymore. Maybe it won’t work out; sometimes when Marks sets off to polish a turd it ends up being just that, *cough* Anthony Bennett. Either way Marks has been able to use his scavenging ways to bring a small glimmer of hope to a franchise that’s been lost in the wilderness for half a decade.