3 Takeaways from Brooklyn Nets 2023-24 regular season

Just over a week removed from their 2023-24 season finale, nobody has paid a shred of attention to the settling dust around the Brooklyn Nets. While the Jordi Fernández hiring indeed brought some interest, some hope to the perished team, the NBA spotlight, rightfully so, belongs to the 16 teams still breathing right now.

It’s been a quiet death — and that’s probably for the better.

I’ve long praised this team’s supporters as some of the league’s toughest. It’s survival of the fittest, and Nets fans are like sharks — persisting through an abundance of cataclysmic, mass extinction events that would have wiped just about anyone else out. This year was another ice age for reasons I’ll get into shortly.

Given its sour nature, I’m sure everyone and their mother would prefer to move on from this season and never look back. But as George Santayana once said, and has since been reworded in countless ways, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I know nobody, not the fans, front office, players, or event staff wants that, so bear with me here.

I believe I missed three games this year, so that’s 237 takeaways logged on the Nets 2023-24 campaign. These final three will get us to a nice even number and encompass the whole season, flaws and all. Cheers.

Superstar Hangover is Real

Something was different about the Brooklyn Nets this year. No, I’m not talking about the addition of the Barclays Center bodega. (The cat was a great touch, though.)

While the Nets lost Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving a little over halfway through last season, their exit left a wound that wasn’t really felt until this one. Like adrenaline in a fight, the energy from Brooklyn’s newly acquired players last year swayed their attention. Their honeymoon phase with Mikal Bridges paired with a Prodigal Son’s return in Spencer Dinwiddie numbed the pain of the seeping, championship dream-crushing gash they just took to their midsection.

This year, that wound stung like a b****. The adrenaline ran out after about a month and a half of play. The Nets spent the rest of the season lying on the ground and bleeding out, dropping games left and right to teams more focused on ping pong balls than any other kind.

“Womp, womp,” said the rest of the league, led mainly by the ever-loud, f-bomb dropping New York Knicks media/online personalities, seemingly still upset over Brooklyn’s throttling of them for four straight years and a certain cover from The New Yorker. The wishing of ill will is understandable. The revisionist history, speaking as if the Knicks somehow dodged a bullet that fateful summer, is laughable. One hundred unfortunate things needed to go wrong for the Nets teams of yore to not win a championship — and all of them did. But you know, that’s not what the orange and blue army wants to hear.

Regardless, none of it matters. Nobody wants to hear the washed up, 25-year-old sitting on the bleachers outside a high school football game talking about how he “used to be all-county” before tearing up his knee. Nobody wants to hear the Nets cry over a pandemic and injury woes on the outside looking in from the playoffs. Glory days, Glory days.

Getting back on their feet into the limelight though, that’s a more lively discussion.

There are multiple routes leading back to championship contention at Brooklyn’s feet. The Denver Nuggets and now the Boston Celtics are current travelers of “build through the draft” avenue. The LeBron James-led Miami Heat and bubble Los Angeles Lakers might argue on behalf of “star hunting” expressway instead.

The debate over which path is better has been pulverized into NBA dust over the past few years, especially with the new CBA making that expressway more bumpy and with plenty of detours. New extension rules as well as the introduction of the supermax contract have contributed to that as well.

Different as those strategies may be, they possess one glaring similarity — they both harbor talent. Pooling together talent, by the draft or transactionally, is something that never fails to at least give you a seat at the contender’s table. It’s a safety net that makes you a threat no matter what. It’s why even some of the more flawed teams, such as the Phoenix Suns, Los Angeles Clippers, or Milwaukee Bucks, still rank near the top of the league in championship odds right now. In the end, in the NBA, it is all about talent.

This year, Brooklyn made it abundantly clear that they had no problem standing pat. They neglected to take either route. They dodged talent. That’s the simple, ugly truth of it. Instead, they chased stability, future flexibility, chemistry, and dare I say “vibes.”

I want to be clear in saying that I do believe there is a place for such things. But while these concepts are worth something, they are not everything. They’re ancillary components to build within your franchise, but not the foundation. They’re sprinkles or a crispy waffle cone — great to have, but worth nothing if the ice cream they surround is rotten.

From the blacktop court across my street to the NBA stage, the foundation for a good team is good basketball players. Crazy, right? The teams with the most have the best chance at winning. That was either overlooked or something the Brooklyn Nets simply did not care about this year. The drop-off from acknowledging that truth like they did in 2019, to what we have now, has been a bone-crunching collapse to an ice-cold floor.

Many have lamented that this season was the least enjoyable Nets campaign of their lives in the comments section here and on Twitter. The team’s reduced appreciation for talent — and how abundantly clear it was — is the reason for that.

While everyone acknowledges Brooklyn’s had worse teams, specifically citing their 70-loss season, with this one, the Nets took their quickest, most sizable, and uncompetitive step back in a long time. That’s maybe (probably) because they want to have the freedom to step forward again in the future, but immediately, it’ll make anyone queasy.

Positions May not Matter, but Roles Do

In an era of positionless basketball, one could be forgiven for thinking these Brooklyn Nets could survive minus a true point guard. While a handful of issues ultimately led to their demise, the lacking attributes commonly associated with a floor general were consistently detrimental in my eyes.

To be fair, the Nets did receive some downhill, drive-and-kick action, and overall offensive stability at the beginning and tail ends of their season. The late-Autumn, early-winter Spencer Dinwiddie was an entirely different player than the one we shipped out to Los Angeles. Then, Dennis Schröder came aboard for the final quarter of the season, giving the Nets a lift, especially on nights when his mid-range jumper found nylon more often than not.

But it’s the meat in the middle, not the bread, that makes a sandwich good or bad. For Brooklyn this year, they got what was in the “nasty patty” from the health inspector episode of SpongeBob Squarepants.

The minimal half court offensive production was perhaps their most glaring example of playmaker deprival this year. Things fluctuated at times, but the Nets ultimately finished eighth last in points per half court plays this season. All but two other teams ranking higher than them, the Houston Rockets and Utah Jazz, made the playoffs or at least the play-in tournament.

If you’re brave enough to go back and watch some film on Brooklyn’s earlier games, you’ll see the eye-test reveals additional evidence to this missing floor general case. Brooklyn made spamming dribble handoffs, that inevitably went nowhere, a habit this season while unable to penetrate the top of the defense. That weak design often led the Nets into two or three dreadful offensive droughts per game, which were usually enough to result in a loss.

At the height of Dinwiddie’s fall off, they also forced Mikal Brides into an on-ball role which became as difficult to watch. While the swingman had some nice moments against the more feeble defensive teams such as the Atlanta Hawks, blitzes on screens consistently gave him trouble.

With a bevy of wings and two other one-dimensional guards in Cam Thomas and Dennis Smith Jr., there simply was not enough balance in the offense to generate consistent scoring, hence why Brooklyn crossed the finish line sixth last in points per game.

With his speed and vision, Schröder proved himself capable of righting this wrong at the end of the year. There lies at least some positivity going forward for this team. However, his contract expires after next season, so this is more of a soft patch-up rather than the sealing of a major leak for this team. Take that as you will.

The Ben Simmons Experiment is Over

With the Nets taking up much (probably too much) of my attention and even after spending hours on hours at the Barclays Center this year, I oftentimes forget that Ben Simmons is on the team. Given his worldwide fame as a public figure on top of Brooklyn’s financial commitment to him, that’s frankly astonishing.

Be that as it may, we cannot act like Ben10 is not on this team. In another injury-plagued campaign, he averaged 6.1 points, 5.7 assists, and 7.9 rebounds per game while suiting up for 15 contests this year. Like it or not, that production, or lack thereof, from your highest-paid player warrants discussion when conducting end-of-season evaluations.

Sure, this year was just more of the same for Simmons — a year haunted by his former self as well as a shining example of how “hope” actually can hurt you, so much to the point where even Andy Dufresne might get bummed out hanging around him. But even with nothing really changing for Simmons and the team still committed to him, this year still felt like the last straw whether both sides realized it or not.

This is true in my opinion based on the following: fit, time, and of course health. Let’s start with the former.

From the start of this past season until now, whispers between Nic Claxton’s camp and the Nets have echoed each other, both voicing a shared interest in inking a new deal this offseason. Most recently, Brian Lewis of the New York Post sat down with Mike Scotto of HoopsHype to further relay that intrigue from both parties.

Brooklyn’s defensive dynamo is expected to receive offers from multiple teams this summer, but the Nets did the necessary salary shredding to meet his projected price tag and stay under the tax. With that said, alongside the Nets launching a new luxury fashion line with Claxton at the forefront, all signs are pointing to his return.

Here’s the problem. With Simmons and Claxton on the floor together, the Nets were horrible.

Brooklyn’s most common lineup with those two this year also featured Mikal Bridges, Cam Thomas, and Dorian Finney-Smith — the usual starters. They logged 37 total minutes together and finished as a -22.9 net. If it qualified with over 100 minutes, that would be the league’s 12th worst in rating for a five man lineup in the league, per CleaningTheGlass.

Then, when you take Claxton out and sub him in for the next Net who started the most games this past year, Spencer Dinwiddie, the lineup ranks among Brooklyn’s best for the season. The Dinwiddie, Thomas, Bridges, Finney-Smith, and Simmons group finished as a +26 and in the 92nd percentile with exactly 100 possessions logged.

Of all the other lineups featuring Claxton and Simmons that played at least double digit minutes together, zero registered a positive net rating.

The proof is in the pudding. Surely due to their spacing issues, Simmons and Claxton are crippling when on the floor together, meaning they both cannot be a part of the team’s long term future. If the rumors around Brooklyn and Claxton linking up for the foreseeable future are true, that means the opposite for Simmons. It’s a simple process of elimination.

The next two elements, time and health, and more cut and dry. This past year was Simmons’ last chance to win a second contract with the Nets in my opinion just in terms of negotiations.

Even if Simmons returns to full form next year, which is a long shot at this point, I doubt Brooklyn would be willing to open their wallets for a guy who’s been mostly out of sight, out of mind for three straight years. I went to school to be a writer, but even I know that’s bad business.

Granted, you always weigh a player’s most recent year the most when gauging their future value, but Simmons’ poor injury history is now so lengthy, so recurring that even a season where plays 60+ games and averages something like 12/5/5 shouldn’t be enough to warrant major dollars.

Two years of productive ball might have been enough to paint over his past, but one (and again, that’s not a given) won’t be enough argumentative ammunition for him and Bernie Lee to retrieve a new deal with Brooklyn that pays well.

I’m not here to say the Nets should trade Simmons this summer. That’s a frustration move and those are never smart ones. Doing so would likely require them to send over draft capital, making themselves suckers to the very scheme they championed during the early Sean Marks days.

However, the hope that he’d become a franchise cornerstone for this team which everyone surely held when they traded James Harden for him was fully extinguished this season. Dish him as a salary filler if you can, but if not, let that contract expire, lick your wounds, and move forward.