The Nets are earning some respect
Surprising Brooklyn making push for playoffs
It wasn’t too long after Sean Marks ascended to the general manager’s role with the Brooklyn Nets that he was chatting with a familiar face and the discussion got around to the enormity of the task at hand.
The Nets were bad — 21-61 in the 2015-16 season — and there were few promising aspects to the franchise or the GM’s job. Brooklyn didn’t have any good players, the draft picks seemingly forever had been forfeited in trades designed to “win now” that turned into “lose a lot.”
It was bleak, and Marks, one of the more well-regarded upand-coming young executives in the NBA, was well aware of what lie ahead.
“Not going to be easy,” he said. “But we’re going to stick it out and make it work.” He did. And they did. An argument can be made that the Nets are the biggest and most pleasant surprise in the NBA this season. They come into a game in Toronto on Friday night with a 21-22 record, good for sixth place in the Eastern Conference.
It’s not the most glittering of records but, seeing as the Nets haven’t been in the playoffs since 2015 and haven’t won a post-season series since they beat the Raptors in 2014, it is a quantum leap.
And they’ve done it without budding star Caris LeVert, who suffered a serious foot injury in mid-November, and with a roster lacking a true star.
But it has a system, they work the system and the system works.
“They are a five-out, drive-ithard, shoot-the-three system,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said Thursday. “They’ve got a pretty succinct defensive idea to what they’re doing. They’ve trusted it, went with it. Obviously guys have bought in. They’ve got a couple nice little additions to complement the guys they’ve developed.”
The Nets seem to have a solid core group in LeVert, Spencer Dinwiddie, Joe Harris and a revitalized D’Angelo Russell. Marks and coach Kenny Atkinson — both doing their jobs for the first time in the NBA — seem to have the requisite patience to allow for growth. Marks did joke back in his early days that his most difficult task was making sure Atkinson didn’t lose his mind with all the losses the Nets suffered.
But both understand that turnarounds don’t happen overnight.
Brooklyn has avoided trying to make some big, splashy roster move because it might not be the best for the longer term, and the Nets could turn into a perennial hard-playing playoff team as soon as this spring.