The consensus among pundits has been the same for more than a week. The Brooklyn Nets had a plan for the NBA trade deadline and it went something like this:
Check, check, check and check.
If you were surprised by the Nets moves between Wednesday and Thursday, you simply haven’t been paying attention or following the wrong pundits. The team’s focus remains on May 10, the draft lottery and beyond rather than April 14, the start of the play-in tournament. They continue to “play the probabilities” — a healthier phrasing than “tanking” – in hopes of landing a generational talent in the NBA Draft at Barclays Center in late June.
Sure, their choice of the three young players they acquired might have surprised as they prioritized development opportunities over the draft, perhaps thinking they have enough? As one fan tweeted Thursday afternoon, the Nets are trading for players he had to google — but after all, that was the point: finding good young players who for whatever reason didn’t succeed in their first jobs. Did they meet their goals?
Here in summary are the specifics of what they did Wednesday and Thursday:
The Nets are now slightly younger with a slightly higher payroll than they were at the beginning of the week. It looks like they’ll have less scoring but a better defense. They’re a bit more athletic well. Both Minott and Agbaji registered 39” max verticals at their respective NBA combines.
They didn’t add a first rounder, but got a couple of new seconds, instead going for young players aged 23, 25 and 25. You can do that if you have 13 firsts — 10 tradeable — and 21 seconds.
Of course, the goal is not racking up wins but as we noted, “playing the probabilities,” leading up to the lottery.
Indeed, it’s the culmination of nearly a year long series of moves that prioritized the future, particularly the 2026 draft. As Yossi Gozlan of capsheets.com and the Third Apron podcast laid out in a tweet, the Nets have now exhausted almost all of the $60 million salary space they created last summer…
As for next summer, Gozlan projects the Nets will continue to be a leader in cap space …
Is that enough? There have been mistakes along the way. As Salary Swish noted, the Nets are paying out $20 million in dead money this season, salaries paid to players who were waived…
We’ll probably get additional information in the next few days about why the Nets did one thing instead of another. Like what do they know about the 2032 NBA Draft? After Thursday, Brooklyn now have six picks — two firsts and four seconds — in a draft whose players are currently 11 or 12 years old. Also, don’t be surprised if things change in Long Island with the two-way contracts. We shall see.
