The Brooklyn Nets have the second worst record in the NBA this season at 11-31 and have played particularly bad lately as they have lost eight of their last nine. Not only is the team looking quite bad for this season but the sad thing is their future might be even bleaker. The Nets have a very limited amount of talent and barely any future assets so a turnaround might take a while.
You might have read the headline and laughed to yourself a little bit thinking "they can't be fixed" and, really, you may be right. The Nets are a complete mess right now and they need a lot of breaks to go their way just to get back to being a good basketball team. I am embarking on the near impossible journey of trying to find ways to fix this franchise, which is likely worse off than the Philadelphia 76ers for the future. Here goes nothing.
1) Hire A GM With Similar Previous Experience: Okay so there aren't many, if any, general managers out there that have experience trying to rebuild a team that doesn't control their first round pick for the next four years. But that's why I said similar. The Nets need someone that has been through a rebuild before and has constructed a roster through the draft and by making shrewd trades.
Some Nets fans will say that the Nets need a new owner but whether that is true or not, it likely won't happen considering Mikhail Prokhorov just bought full ownership of the team. So with Prokhorov looking like he will be around for a while longer the best thing would be to bring in a solid GM.
Prokhorov has unrealistic expectations of being a contender next season so what the new GM needs to do is convince him that the best plan of action is to look long-term and try to have sustained success. Someone who makes sense for this position is Bryan Colangelo, who has been linked to the job since Billy King was re-assigned. Colangelo engineered the Toronto Raptors team that currently has the second best record in the Eastern Conference and rebuilt them the right way.
2) Hire A Coach Who Can Grow With The Team: Lionel Hollins was just fired after he did not have much success with this team over the past couple of years. Hollins can hardly be blamed for everything that went wrong with the Nets but now it is time to look for a new coach.
Right now the Nets are trending towards becoming a younger team at the core with Joe Johnson likely playing elsewhere next year and the Nets being very high on Rondae Hollis-Jefferson and Chris McCullough. Brook Lopez and Thaddeus Young will likely be around long-term and they are veterans but the reality is the Nets need to build a young core around those two so that the team can grow together.
Hollins' hire was fine at the time because when he was hired the Nets thought they would contend for a title but now the Nets are in a different situation. The Nets would be wise to hire someone who is willing to take his lumps with a bad team for a couple of years and is willing to let younger players develop so that when they are done developing and ready to win they already have camaraderie. Jason Kidd would have been the perfect guy but he chose to go to Milwaukee to do that same thing with the Bucks.
3) Stop Trading Draft Picks!: This kind of goes without saying if you are a Nets fan but it is worth mentioning and it will always be an issue with Prokhorov breathing down the GM's neck to win now. It was admirable of the Nets to go all-in and do everything they could to win a championship but the experiment failed miserably and it has crippled their future. The Nets traded a bunch of draft picks in the past few years but that needs to stop now.
The NBA is not a league that can be won through free agency and trades, for the most part, and most championship teams are built through the draft. It is hard to build through the draft when you don't have any picks though, so the Nets need to not only hang on to theirs but they would be wise to look to acquire some via trades.
Right now the Nets don't have the assets to make trades to improve their roster and the top free agents in the class likely won't view Brooklyn as a realistic option considering most of them want to win. Building through the draft is the only way and it starts by compiling drafts picks or young players with potential.
If you are a Nets fan there are no realistic quick fixes to the mess that has been made in Brooklyn so prepare yourself for a couple of really long seasons in the near future. Having said that though, there are things to be done, like the ones mentioned above, that can set them up for success in the future and this time it will hopefully be sustained success for them instead of a flash in the pan.
