Sean Marks’ Brooklyn Nets Rebuild Has Now Officially Begun
How do you rebuild a fallen empire? One brick at a time.
That’s the task facing Sean Marks and the Brooklyn Nets since the kiwi took over as General Manager of the franchise. That was a decision that drew celebration and it drew sympathetic salutations. For Marks, despite reports that he was ready to decline the job, it ultimately proved one that was too good to ignore. When else is he ever going to get the opportunity to be a general manager for an NBA franchise again?
So fair enough for him to take this challenge on. Hey, if he resigns in a couple years and the team is still awful, it won’t be his fault. He didn’t dig this hole – he’s the one trying to haul them out of it.
The situation reads as thus:
- The Brooklyn Nets have no control of their first round draft picks until 2019.
- The Brooklyn Nets roster does not contain anything resembling a transcendent player, with only one all-star appearance combined (Brook Lopez in 2013).
- The Brooklyn Nets ransomed their future to chase a championship upon moving to Brooklyn – with a single playoff series win in three seasons to show for it before they gave up the ghost.
- The Brooklyn Nets won only 21 games last season.
This isn’t a tough job, it’s the toughest job in the NBA. Starting point guard for the New York Knicks is easier than this gig. The whole point of the draft system is to spread out the incoming talent amongst the league every year, giving the best new player to the worst teams. One problem there is that it incentivises losing, like if you’re gonna lose you may as well lose as much as possible. The Nets and their 61 losses were topped (bottomed) only by the Philadelphia 76ers and Los Angeles Lakers last season but while those two teams came out of that disaster with picks #1 and #2, the Nets’ selection went to the Boston Celtics. As will also be the case in 2018 and next year the Celtics have the option of a pick swap.
The positive of that is that the Nets have no reason not to be as good as they possibly can be. The negative is that it’s very hard to go from poor to good without drafted players. Free agents are a tough sell for a lottery team, while trades only work when you have something to trade. So this off-season was not going to bring the make or break deal that turns things around. The first step towards greatness is mediocrity and Sean Marks’ job right now is to steady this ship and get a functional franchise going out of it all.
It began with hiring a competent head coach. They did that, inking Kenny Atkinson into the gig – KA had been an assistant coach at the Atlanta Hawks, serving under Mike Budenholzer which meant that Marks’ Spurs connections were still showing through even in a secondary nature, Coach Bud being of the Popovich Coaching Tree and all.
Naturally there have been a number of small, subtle transactions and restructurings since Marks took over but nothing drastic that you wouldn’t see in any franchise. That stuff is like writing your name on the exam sheet, it was when the draft and free agency kicked off that we finally, after months of set up, planning and suspense, got to see the Sean Marks strategy come into play. It was… slow at first.
Kenny Atkinson (July 6): “We’re following our plan so far. It’s a plan we stated from the beginning and we’re sticking with it. It’s not always the big, splashy headlines. I think where we are and our stage right now, I think we’re very happy with how things have gone so far. I like the place we’re in.”
The NBA Finals are obviously the end of each season as far as the basketball goes but the next one truly begins at the Draft. Given that the Nets only had one draft pick, coming in at the dizzying heights of 55th overall, they did pretty well to come out of it with two players then.
The one bloke that Marks was meant to draft himself was traded to the Utah Jazz along with a bit of cash for the 42nd pick instead. So Marcus Paige, a point guard out of North Carolina, will find himself in Utah and Brooklyn native Isaiah Woodhead, a shooting guard out of Seton Hall, gets to don the black of the Nets. They also wrangled a move for the #20 pick in there too though. For that first rounder it cost them their most tradeable asset in Thad Young, who will now play for the Indiana Pacers but in return they were able to pick up Michigan SG Caris LeVert. A couple of decent, hopefully dependable players. Nothing especially flashy about the picks, nothing especially risky either although LeVert did have injury troubles in college. They might have hoped for more in return for Thad Young but with all the cap space out there and players ready to test that market, veteran trades weren’t really of much value this year.
Yet a clever team will always pick up a few steals in free agency. The Nets have been the opposite of a clever team in the past but then that’s what Sean Marks is there to fix. With enough cap space to flaunt a max contract at any takers, the Nets chose not to follow that route and instead target a series of B-Level free agents that might have snuck under the radar elsewhere as other teams chased the big names.
Like, maybe the Clippers would be too busy chasing Kevin Durant to notice if they snuck an offer to Jamal Crawford. Or the Mavericks getting a Hassan Whiteside shaped gleam in their eyes as the Nets snuck out with Dwight Powell. Same with Kent Bazemore and the Hawks, what with their Dwight Howard pursuit. Unfortunately all three of those players re-signed with their previous teams. Likewise Marvin Williams returned to Charlotte, Jared Dudley signed in Phoenix and Sergio Rodriguez in Philadelphia. All players that the Nets were rumoured to be chasing. The early days of free agency are tough for teams like this, who were supposed to have already gotten their fill in the draft.
But they did get Jeremy Lin. Three years and $36 million, Lin joins Brook Lopez in forming the new core of this team. Why did Lin take up this deal when so many others looked away? Well, first of all it returns him to New York City, the home of Linsanity, where he still has plenty of fans. Secondly it’ll mean a starting role after a decent but undermined year of playing off the bench in Charlotte. Thirdly it reunites him with former NYK assistant… Kenny Atkinson. A man whose prowess at getting the best out of point guards is something of a legend.
Considering the other point guards on the market, this was a shrewd move too. Mike Conley got max money to stay in Memphis and the Lin contract is definitely better value than the Rajon Rondo one in Chicago.
In order to fit Lin in there, they waived the contract of Jarrett Jack, last year’s starting point guard. No worries there, Lin is a considerably better player and unlike Jack he isn’t coming off a season-ending ACL injury. Not quite the ideal free agent big fish but you do what you can when you’re working your way out of the lottery. They also paid $18m/2yrs to get Trevor Booker and $6m/2yrs for Justin Hamilton. Booker played power forward off the bench for the Jazz last year, averaging 5.9 points and 5.7 rebounds in 20.7 minutes. He comes in as a direct replacement for Thad Young, while Hamilton is a journeyman centre who played in Spain last season and has 49 NBA games to his name across three different teams. He’s only 26 and is seven foot tall so there’s stuff on his side. To be honest, even if neither of them make the step up that’s hoped of them they’re still only two year deals and with the expanding salary cap they should be able to foot it. There was also talk of trying to sort a trade out for Jose Calderon, who Chicago had gotten in the Derrick Rose trade but needed to offload in order to fit Dwyane Wade in. That was a close thing, until the LA Lakers swooped in.
If all this mostly sounds either unambitious or way too ambitious, here’s where the real plan came stepping out of the fog. The Nets had enormous quantities of cash to spend and Jeremy Lin certainly didn’t take it all up. Instead they kept it to the side to go after a few restricted free agents: Allen Crabbe and Tyler Johnson.
Tyler Johnson was undrafted in 2014 and made his name then in the D-League before getting a go on the Miami Heat roster. The 24 year old guard has only played 68 NBA games in his career and just seven of them were starts, but a really impressive start to last season had him shooting 48.8% from the field before shoulder surgery ruled him out until May, costing him most of the season. Allen Crabbe, on the other hand (also 24 years old), had himself a proper breakout year for the Trail Blazers last time out – as a few on that team did. 10.3 points playing off the bench, he went 31st overall in the 2013 draft and was set to be a reserve again in Portland. Two very risky moves here, at least on the surface. 24 career starts between them, Johnson’s deal is four years for $50m and Crabbe’s is four years for $75m.
The thing with restricted free agents is that their current team has three days to match any offer sheet that is submitted to the player. Hence they’re restricted, it’s the same trick that allowed the Thunder to keep Enes Kanter after the Trail Blazers offered him a max deal last season (probably to force OKC’s bluff as much as anything). But Marks had a trick up his sleeve, which was pretty ingenious. He back-loaded Johnson’s deal. The first two years are worth $6m and $7m with the next two worth $18m and then $19m. It’s what’s known as a ‘poison pill’ provision and given that the Heat just got Hassan Whiteside’s signature on a max deal, even with the cap expanding they weren’t too well placed to match that without making big sacrifices elsewhere.
Unfortunately for the Nets, they did. And so did the Trail Blazers. Portland were desperate to keep together a winning group of young players that they’d assembled and so after re-signing Meyers Leonard, they also matched the offer sheet for Crabbe, who soon confirmed it all on twitter.
A tough break for the Nets who were banking on the Blazers not being prepared to call their bluff. The day got worse when hours later the Miami Heat matched the Johnson offer. Earlier that day the hints had been made with cheap, tidy contracts sorted out for Derrick Williams, Udonis Haslem and Wayne Ellington – the latter a bit of a kick in the nuts because Ellington was a Nets free agent that had been let loose (he wouldn’t have stayed anyway, to be fair).
Again, these were a pair of very risky moves. Unproven players with only small sample sizes of fulfilled potential and no control over the finalising of contracts. But they’re young and the upside is high, which is what Sean Marks, Kenny Atkinson and their team were banking on. As far as risky moves go, this was pretty solid stuff. With the cap inflation that’s been mentioned roughly 300 times already in this article alone, there has never been a better time to overpay your basketballers.
But when you’re in the position the Brooklyn Nets are in, this is the way things go. That doesn’t mean that Marks made a poor call on this, it was more that he placed his chips with a decent hand… and the dealer drew blackjack.
If all had gone as planned and the Blazers and Heat didn’t match those offers then the Nets would have been looking at a starting five of Jeremy Lin/Tyler Johnson/Allen Crabbe/Trevor Booker/Brook Lopez (or Johnson as backup PG and sixth man, maybe), which is a whole lot better than what they had and whatever they’ll end up with now. Having said that, you can add in guys like Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, Bojan Bogdanovic and Chris McCullough and you still have a youthful team that ought to be able to score. Potentially a few steals in the Summer Leagues as well, Yogi Ferrell is getting good reviews for one.
And there are a few guys out there worth pursuing. Dion Waiters will be one, although he’s got a few other suitors. The good news is that they have over $35m in cap space remaining all of a sudden, though don’t expect them to use it all. After this stumble, they might wanna save some for the odd opportunistic trade down the line. They’ve already got a deal in the works with Greivis Vasquez, by report. Plus they might yet get the last laugh, with both of those tendered offers, Crabbe and Johnson, carrying all sorts of devilish details – trade kickers that make them hard to offload, performance bonuses for things like wins that the Nets wouldn’t have had to pay but the Blazers and Heat probably will, advance payments and things like that.
As well as being guys with something to prove in bigger roles, Johnson and Crabbe are the kinds of pure shooting, athletic, versatile young players that the NBA is trending towards and while the Nets were wagering on Atkinson and his team getting more out of them than we’d seen before, the deals made sense. It didn’t pay off but the logic was there. Keep at this line of reasoning and eventually something will click into place that could change the course of the franchise. Often it’s only that one move that does it – a Harden trade, for example, and the hard work is in laying the foundations that make it possible. Slowly but surely they’re heading in the right direction, though they’ll probably cop a few more days like this one before they get there.
Oh and if you were wondering how this stressful gig was treating old Marsky Marks, it’s not so bad. He’s recently snapped up a holiday home in California.