The Nets need to move on.
News broke last week that Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokherov has hired an international investment bank to shop the team to perspective buyers. The team needs to be sellers with its roster as well.
It could come in season, after it, or following the eventual sale, but the current Nets roster needs a shake up if the team plans on bringing a world title to Brooklyn. The Nets nearly began purging its stable of its current stars. But unlike the team, center Brook Lopez was taken off the market.
Brooklyn was in talks with Oklahoma City for Kendrick Perkins and Jeremey Gibbs and with Charlotte on a deal that could have brought Coney Island native Lance Stephenson home. Lopez’s importance has decreased with the emergence of Mason Plumlee, and Lopez is certainly a player contending teams will want.
Lopez is the easiest and first piece that needs to be moved. He has a year left on his contract where he is slated to make $16.7 million in 2015. Nets coach Lionel Hollins has called Lopez out for being lazy and wants him to toughen up. Moving Lopez is the first step toward revamping the Nets’ roster and possibly taking some money off the payroll.
This group of Nets, led by Lopez, Joe Johnson, and Deron Williams, has not lived up to the lofty expectations placed on them. Brooklyn was supposed to be a title contender last season after Prokherov broke the bank to stack the roster. The group has helped make Barclays Center a destination, but the best the team has done during its time in Brooklyn is a conference semifinals appearance last season.
This year’s version of the Nets (17–25) has been up and down and sits a game ahead of Charlotte and Detroit for the eighth and final playoff spot in the East. Brooklyn is 2–8 in its last 10 games coming into this week.
The contracts of Lopez, Johnson, Williams, and Kevin Garrett make it tough to fill in talent around the team, and the Nets traded away a wealth of draft picks in the trade with the Celtics two summers ago.
The franchise is allowed to make a run at the postseason this year, and I’d never discourage a team from doing that, but seventh and eight in the Eastern Conference is not what Brooklyn fans were promised — or deserve.
With its owner jumping ship, and valuable commodities on its roster, the Nets can’t let the chance to get something for Lopez or even an aging Garnett get away. Williams, if he can ever stay healthy, and Johnson can still be part of a championship winning roster, but the Nets need to get younger and more athletic players around them.
For the Nets, that means trades, and a very different roster coming back for the 2015–16 season. The franchise is in the midst of a transition in the owner’s box, and it needs some changes on the bench as well.
