Brooklyn Nets: The last reminders of a past life
Over the next 10 days, the Brooklyn Nets will be on a family reunion of some sort. Just as you’ll be seeing some distant relatives this holiday season, so too will the Nets.
Over the next five games, the Brooklyn Nets will be playing teams with some of the last New Jersey Nets players in the league.
In total there are eight players who played in the Nets’ red, white, and blue currently on NBA rosters. (And no, that does not count Kyle Korver, whose draft rights were traded by the Nets for money that would end up buying a copy machine.)
One of those players is with the Dallas Mavericks, who the Nets play Wednesday. Another two they will play next week, from the Utah Jazz and Memphis Grizzlies, respectively.
Why is that?
Well for one, the last couple of seasons at the Izod Center and later the Prudential Center, were not the most competitive seasons for the franchise. The team averaged a shade over 25 wins in the last five seasons in Jersey.
The teams were not made up of young stars that could have had long careers in the NBA.
Rather most of the rosters, especially toward the end, were a cobbled together team of journeymen players close to or at the end of their NBA runs and late-first or second-round draft picks, who were either too raw at that point of their career to contribute or whose weaknesses didn’t allow them to compete long term on the NBA level at all.
Players who were drafted or who played a part of their first five years in the last years of New Jersey Nets basketball would at this point be in their late 20s or early 30s at this point.
While they should be the prime of most players’ careers, a lot of those players were out of the league within the last year or two after their tenure in New Jersey.
Also it should be noted that in the last decade or so, there has been an intensified search by every team in the NBA to find the next big thing; the next NBA G League star or undrafted player to make the leap into productive minutes.
Think of players like Jeremy Lin for the New York Knicks in 2012 or Jonathon Simmons on the San Antonio Spurs a couple years ago. Most teams are just more likely to now choose the malleable, young player than the established veteran nowadays.
Here are the players who have outlasted the New Jersey Nets.