Nets expected to follow shorter rebuild strategy with 2025 a pivotal year
The question of how deep Brooklyn wants to go in its rebuild is an ownership-level one.And so far, neither Nets owner Joe Tsai nor general manager Sean Marks has tipped his hand, either publicly or privately.But agents and league executives who’ve spoken with The Post are reading the tea leaves.And those leaves are showing more of a painful-but-short strategy than the death-by-a-thousand cuts misery the Pistons have been going through.There are risks down each path.But the NBA is expecting the Nets to pick the shorter fork.
And that’s probably the smarter fork.Clearly, franchise-altering decisions like that have to be made by the man (or woman) where the buck stops.The signing of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.The trading of both superstars, Durant for Mikal Bridges and four first-round draft picks.And now shipping Bridges across the East River for five more first-rounders (and a pick swap) — even if it means watching the rival Knicks compete for a title, if that’s the Nets’ best chance to eventually do the same someday down the road.The shorter path down that road is to keep going the way they’re going, to use the 16 first-round picks Marks has collected and — after letting the expiring deals of Ben Simmons, Bojan Bogdanovic and Dennis Schroder run out next summer — spend a staggering $80 million in 2025 cap space.Voila.
If not instant improvement, at least the seeds for one.Or so they hope.Granted, NBA free agency doesn’t operate like it did five years ago when Brooklyn added Durant and Irving, and the Clippers signed Kawhi Leonard.Superstars just re-sign now for max deals and force their way out later, like Durant.Houston made a quick jump adding players a notch or three below like Fred VanVleet and Dillon Brooks to their youngsters, and it took just two years.But the alternative is to repeat Marks’ methods in his first rebuild, ie, trading away those expiring deals for other teams’ salary dumps to garner even more draft assets.
The risk t...