The Brooklyn Nets do not have the best track record with NBA superstars but they haven’t lost any faith in their ability to recruit more talent in the future. According to Nets insider Brian Lewis, Nets executives are still confident that top-level players will still want to come play for them in New York City.
“They feel they can recruit players. That 100% is their belief… They believe that guys will want to play in New York… Between talking with agents and players, they have a feeling they can attract players.”
The Brooklyn Nets were among the favorites in the East not too long ago, back when they had Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden. Before that, they had stars like D’Angelo Russell, Deron Williams, and Brook Lopez keeping them competitive.
This season, however, all they have is Ben Simmons. Despite being the team’s highest-paid player, Simmons has played just 57 games for the Nets over the past three seasons, with a scoring average of just 6.7 points per game. He’s entering the final year of his deal, worth over $40 million.
Without Simmons and a lot of other key rotation players throughout the season, Brooklyn has struggled to stay out of the Eastern Conference bunker. They rank 11th in the East and are a whopping 18 games below .500.
Since the Nets don’t own any of their own draft picks, the only way out of this nightmare is to bring in another superstar to play alongside Mikal Bridges, Nicolas Claxton, and Cam Thomas. When Simmons’ contract comes off the books next year, they’ll have their chance to bring in top-level talent and we will see then how much interest star players have in joining the Nets.
Brooklyn Nets Have Bad History With NBA Superstars
Starting with the blockbuster move for Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce in 2013, the Nets have been plagued with one bad decision after another. The veteran duo lasted just one season in Brooklyn before the team broke it up — and it took years for the Nets to recover from that trade, especially after giving up so many assets.
In the summer of 2019, everything changed for Brooklyn when they signed Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving to lucrative new deals. While the acquisitions were highly praised then, they would end in disaster for the Nets.
In just a few seasons, Durant and Kyrie came to blows with the front office over certain guidelines related to COVID-19 and it started a war from the inside that broke the team apart. The Nets completely turned on Kyrie Irving specifically, and at one point tried to force him to comply with six “conditions” in order to return to action.
Most NBA teams don’t have such an extensive history of drama with their stars, and even fewer can claim that they’ve lost three superstars in the span of a year. But despite their history, the Nets remain confident that someone will join soon enough and they will need a true superstar in order to turn their current situation around.
Nobody knows who the Nets have in mind as a potential target, but any person they consider will remember what happened with Durant, Irving, and every other tar who has come through the franchise.
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