Looking at how the Brooklyn Nets have started out the season
The Boston Celtics are a good basketball team in the present. They’re also positioned to be a force to be reckoned with in the future, a reality driven by the team’s control of the Brooklyn Nets’ first round picks in the next two years. The Nets are considered, by most, to be one of the worst teams in the NBA, and a likely candidate to earn one of the top three spots in next year’s loaded lottery. With that kind of team building tool in their pocket, the Celtics are free to compete as aggressively as they want without jeopardizing their odds at nabbing a future star.
Conversely, Brooklyn has managed to lose all incentive for tanking, without becoming even a competent team. That’s a sad place for a franchise and fanbase to find itself, but in Boston it’s reason for rejoicing. It’s a rather sadistic concept, but the more misery the Nets are forced to endure, the greater pleasure the Celtics will derive. That’s where we come in.
Following two basketball teams all year is an exhausting task, so we’ll simplify it for you by providing monthly updates on what is happening in Brooklyn, known as the “Brooklyn Nets Sadness Index”.The Nets have only played three games to date, with one more on tap for tonight. That isn’t much to go off of for this month’s iteration, but we’ll try our best to extrapolate what we can.
Brooklyn is 1-2 to start the year. That’s not very good, but they’ve looked better in their first three games than one might have assumed. Their two losses have come by a combined seven points, and they’re the NBA’s only team with a losing record that has a positive net margin per 100 possessions. In fact, the Nets are only a few made shots (or misses on the part of their opponents) from being undefeated.
Jeremy Lin has played well, the team’s bench has looked surprisingly feisty, and most importantly, new head coach Kenny Atkinson has all the trappings of the next big thing to emerge from the Atlanta Hawks’ solid coaching infrastructure. He’s got his team pushing the pace and launching threes at the second highest rate in the league, and he hasn’t been afraid to play the type of smaller more flexible lineups that make those more modern strategies tenable. Ultimately, Brooklyn probably doesn’t have the talent to sustain an effective space and pace approach, but the fact that Atkinson is experimenting with new age principles is reason enough for excitement.
Brooklyn has appeared, for years, to be a team without a future and a playing style as equally stuck in the past as it its prospects moving forward. Atkinson has set them on a path to shifting the latter, and in doing so begun to solve the former. That doesn’t mean it will be all sunshine and daisies in Brooklyn this year. The Nets are still going to be bad, but they might not be quite as bad as everyone originally thought. It’s an unfortunate reality for Celtics fans, but at least through three games, the Nets aren’t quite as much of a lock for the bottom spot in the league as they were presumed to be coming into the season.
Next: Al Horford Needs to be More Aggressive
Given all of this, we’re pegging the Brooklyn Nets Sadness Index at 6 (out of 10). They’ve looked better than anticipated, but they’ve still got a losing record, and three games is too few to suggest that there is reason for any real optimism. There are glimpses of glimpses of hope here, and that’s more than many would have predicted. We’ll see if they’re still there a month from now.