Nets general manager Billy King met the media Tuesday ahead of Wednesday’s regular-season opener against the Bulls in Brooklyn and tried to sell his team’s positives. He didn’t have a lot to offer.
After years of spending big bucks and chasing championship dreams, the new reality facing the Nets will be on display Wednesday night.
The goal is to make the playoffs, though the chances are remote. The hope is to have the team’s young players develop, but only one — Thomas Robinson — is a lottery pick, and he is playing for his sixth team in three-plus seasons. The expectation is the team is going to get along much better without the talented Deron Williams, but will that translate into success when the Nets have taken an undeniable step back at point guard?
That’s the situation they face this season — after which they will send their first-round pick to the Celtics as part of the ongoing payoff for acquiring Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett two summers ago — and the one King is now trying to navigate.
“The goal is to make the playoffs because once you get in, it’s a new season,” King said after the team’s final practice of the preseason at its New Jersey facility. “Every year you can do that, you gain experience, and you never know what happens when you get in there.”
The Nets have managed to make the playoffs each of the first three seasons in Brooklyn — including claiming the eighth and final spot on the last day last season — but they face an uphill climb this time. Though Brook Lopez seems set to have a career year, and the Nets made smart moves to lock up Lopez and Thaddeus Young while taking several good fliers on cheap free agents this summer, they have a roster that is thought by many to be much closer to the worst in the league than one of the 16 best.
In order to defy those odds, the Nets not only will need big production from Lopez, Young and Joe Johnson, but they’ll need their young players to develop — something King hopes will transpire as they get playing time.
“It’s going to take time,” King said of getting those young players experience. “They have to play and they’re going to make mistakes and we’ve got to live with them because the only way we’re going to get better is applying it on the court.
“We have the ability to get better as a team because we do have some inexperience with some guys. But we need our main guys, our veteran guys to carry us, to do their part to allow the young guys to sort of blend in and help.”
If everything comes together — from Lopez excelling to Young and Johnson supporting to Jarrett Jack improving over last season to the young guys taking a step forward to some lottery tickets panning out — then the Nets could find themselves back in the postseason.
That’s also a lot of “ifs” that have to come together. This is the bed the Nets have made for themselves, and now they have to spend the next six months lying in it, hoping it will be as comfortable as possible.
“You guys have to make the predictions, and we still have to play the game,” King said. “I don’t think our guys are bulletin-board material guys. We’re gonna play. We’re gonna play Chicago and, at the end of the year, I’ll talk to you guys and you’ll ask me to recap what I think about this season and we’ll talk about it then.
“We know we’re not a finished product at this point, and the goal is to get better, and if something were to present itself as we do our jobs that will make us a better organization we’ll do it, but I think we’ve revamped, got some youth, and now I want to see how we play, see how some of the pieces we acquired fit, how they go.”