Brooklyn Nets look like they’re going to meet Nic Claxton’s demands. It’s the right call.

The loudest move for the Brooklyn Nets at the 2024 trade deadline was the one that they didn’t make. Exchanging Spencer Dinwiddie for Dennis Schröder was nice, bringing in another competent but far feistier point guard with another year under his contract, and while offloading Royce O’Neale for a few second-rounders was also the right move in a vacuum, it signaled that they missed their chance to capitalize on his peak value, as it was reported in months prior that the veteran forward could have fetched a first.

But when Brooklyn didn’t trade the expiring Nic Claxton, indeed there was only a little buzz that Sean Marks & co. even considered it, it spoke volumes in a way those other two housekeeping moves didn’t: They planned on re-signing the 24-year-old center and felt comfortable about their prospects.

Free agency is still nearly two months away, but for now, it appears as if the plan is on track. As NetsDaily has reported, the Nets are confident they can re-sign the lanky lefty, with an annual price tag that will land somewhere between $20-25 million.

“Through my conversations with executives,” said Michael Scotto on a recent episode of the HoopsHype podcast, “I’d say [Claxton] remains around that $20 million figure annually. I think $25 million would be his ceiling as of now.”

The New York Post’s Brian Lewis agreed, stating his belief that the chances of a Claxton reunion are “over” 50 percent. On the Brooklyn side of negotiations, that assessment appears to slightly undersell the teams’ confidence, whether judging by conversations with people around the organization, or their content team continuing to promote him, or the digital billboards still up around the Barclays Center...

Many fans, though, have expressed dismay at the $25 million number that’s been floated as a high-end outcome for Claxton’s contract. That’s an overreaction.

Should he get there, Clax would be the 10th highest-paid center in the league. A couple million fewer, and he’s tax-bracket-buddies with Brook Lopez and Clint Capela, while $20 million puts him in the neighborhood of Jarrett Allen, Nikola Vučević, and Myles Turner.

Let’s take the the second ex-Net from that list — Allen — as a reference point, likely the best player on that list as well. Allen just made the 2024 All-Star team as a replacement. We sorted comparisons using DARKO, a solely predictive metric based on box-score and plus-minus stats, considered to have overtaken EPM as the sport’s most reliable all-in-one metric...

Of course, any all-in-one-metric is just a supporting tool and not the whole kit, but DARKO spits out some obvious truths: Jarrett Allen has turned into a very good, maybe great player, but you’d still rather give Nikola Jokić double or triple his money. (And sorry, James Wiseman.)

It also spells out an extreme tale of Claxton’s most recent season in that he did not nearly match his production from the 2022-23 campaign. Now that was truly fantastic.

He led the league in field-goal percentage, shooting 80.5% at the rim and 51.4% from 3-10 feet, per basketball reference. Not only was Claxton one of the league’s premier lob-threats, but he finished plenty of hooks and floaters on nearly three attempts a game, spoon-fed only on occasion...

Still, Claxton was more impressive on the other end of the floor, blocking 2.5 shots per game while remaining one of the switchiest centers of the pre-Wemby era. Clax finished No. 9 in Defensive Player of the Year voting, but was tracking far higher than that prior to Brooklyn’s structural implosion at the 2023 trade deadline.

DARKO gets all that right, as it does his fall-off in the 2023-24 campaign. The rim-finishing “dropped” to 77%, but more eye-opening was the 43.4% he shot from 3-10 feet; those floaters and hooks just weren’t the same weapon for the kid taken 31st in the 2019 Draft.

After Kevin Ollie took the coaching reins, the Nets ran a bit more of their offense through the big man, but not enough to make a dent in their ineptitude, or his scoring output...

But these basic box-score statistics don’t tell the full story either, though. Claxton’s finishing numbers were bound for some regression, but his effort didn’t have to follow the same path. Instead, after erasing any concerns about his motor in that ‘23 campaign, those concerns returned in ‘24, the single biggest reason for his year-over-year decline.

His second and third efforts weren’t always there, particularly (not) running the floor in transition. And even on a night-to-night or week-to-week basis, Brooklyn didn’t know which Clax was going to show up. Was it going to be the player who stuffed Chet Holmgren, Jaren Jackson Jr., and Victor Wembanyama down trash chutes? Or was it going to be the guy who got out-worked by JJJ’s backup in the rematch ... to say nothing of Wemby’s dominance in round two?

DARKO seems a bit too harsh — Clax was never quite a negative on the court — but the fall-off was real.

I am also not sold on his supposed “hub” potential on O, wheeling around the perimeter to hit dribble-handoffs, fake them too, and play in the short roll. However, Jordi Fernández based on his quotes about Claxton two weeks ago, believes in his big man’s “ability to play the dribble-handoff game which, as you guys know, lately in the NBA is a style that is very efficient. And it helps with ball movement. So when everybody touches the ball and everybody’s involved, everybody’s happier.”

This would be a fascinating mid-career development for Clax, because unlike most of the talented passing bigs who dominate in the short-roll and around the perimeter, Brooklyn would be building around the skill that most of those bigs ultimately lack. What’s made Nic Claxton effective with the ball in his hands is his ability to go from 0-to-60 quicker than nearly every other player of his size...

But that driving ability is the cherry on top of effective post-hub offense. Once the defense has taken away all the handoffs and backdoors and kick-outs, can you go get to the hoop? We know Claxton can, but uh, what about the first part?

To that end, he’s a surface-level passer. Simple reads get made, but the Georgia product scans the floor at a walking pace, with disadvantaged defenders often able to stay one step ahead...

Claxton has more in his game in terms of transition ball-handling, attacking mismatches in isolation, and yes, continuing to participate in dribble-handoffs and faking them as a counter. But real flashes of Domantas Sabonis? There are none.

Thing is, there don’t need to be. Brooklyn will pay him because we’ve seen evidence of what he is, not what he could become. Alternating between decent drop-defender and world-destroying switch-big, he turned in a top-50 (likely higher) season at age 23. Has he started to regress from his peak at age 24, or does the stench of Brooklyn’s failures this season — of which he certainly played a role — make that a forgivable sin? an aberration?

Ultimately, it’s fair to demand more of Claxton as a key piece of the Nets’ long-term plans ... while paying him anyway. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened!

Even if the scoring efficiency isn’t best-in-the-league level as it was in 2023, do we put more stock into that version of Claxton than the one we saw in 2024, a season that opened with Ben Simmons clogging the paint on one end and Brooklyn exclusively playing drop defense on the other, then continued with Spencer Dinwiddie — the only reliable shot-creator on the team — not-so-quietly quitting, and finally ended with a two-month tour of team-wide misery? I do!

At least enough to argue that the Nets can’t afford to let Claxton walk over $5 million, if that’s what it comes down to. Brooklyn might be aggressive elsewhere this summer, but they’re not competing for a title next season. And two years from now, $25 million will 16% of the salary cap. Look at the type of players making between 16% and 20% of the cap this season; none of them even sniffed the All-Star game!

And functionally, there is almost no difference between paying Claxton $20 million and $25 million for a Brooklyn team that is miles away from having to worry about those type of margins. Paying him about 10% more than you deem to be market value in year one of the contract? For a non-contender (and even for a contender) that’s absolutely a better alternative to losing him for nothing, especially when Brooklyn could stay under the luxury tax anyway!

Even if Sean Marks makes the former first pick of the second round the 10th-highest paid center right now, Clax will fall one or two spots in that pricey category every year of the contract.

Yes, I am a bit higher on Claxton’s impact than most, and more willing to write off this season — in which he still finished 58th in the NBA in a composite weighing of eight catch-all metrics, per Bleacher Report’s Andy Bailey — as a brief downturn...

I don’t believe Claxton to be at the center of Brooklyn’s rebounding problems — not in their switching coverages, and not in their overly conservative drop coverages to start the season, when they were a top-5 defensive rebounding team.

For Fernández, it’ll be about striking the right balance with Brooklyn’s defense, an issue every coach faces, but he could lean on Noah Clowney at the 4. Not only does Clowney provide positional size and shot-blocking there, but there’s already proof-of-concept in playing a bigger, defensive-minded 4 next to Claxton. Forget the astounding 107 defensive rating Brooklyn posted with the Clowney-Claxton front-court this season, how about the 111 DRTG they posted with Claxton, Kevin Durant and Claxton on the floor last season, in a much, much larger sample size?

“I think Nic is the number one priority for us,” said Marks after Brooklyn’s season ended. “There’s no doubt about that. We hope he’s a Net for a very long time. We hope we can continue to build around him, and build with him, and so forth.”

The Brooklyn GM has the right idea here, not only due to the defensive potential of Claxton and Clowney in a league heading back toward versatility and size. The homegrown Net — the team’s biggest developmental success since moving to Brooklyn — has already produced at a high level, in multiple team contexts. No player is exempt from blame for a disappointing 2024 season, but we know what Nic Claxton can do, and it’s quite valuable.

It’s time to pay him.