You’ve seen this opening movie sequence before.

There’s chaos all around. Fires and explosions rage on. Cars, buildings, and human bodies are flying across the screen that are mixed in with some wildly choreographed CGI stunts. All of it designed to look like pure hysteria.

The hero will of course need to overcome all of it to save humanity, get the girl, and all that heart-warming heroism that moviegoers spend millions of dollars to witness in spite of insurmountable odds. But before he does, this particular movie scene trope starts with a personal narrative from the hero to set up the flashback that sets the stage for the movie. As the lunacy around him rages on, he’ll look to the camera with a wink to the audience and ask “How did we get here?”

That’s what we’ll ask ourselves about the Brooklyn Nets. How did we get here? Because chaos doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. There needs to be some sort of story exposition in this particular narrative.

Starting at the very beginning might take too long. Making the leap from Dr. James Naismith to New Jersey to Long Island to Julius Erving to The Meadowlands to Jason Kidd to Brooklyn just requires the reader to know that the sport of basketball exists and there is currently a professional team in Brooklyn, New York that competes against the best players in the world for glory and championships. Instead, let’s begin with the conclusion of last season, with a Nets team that just made a surprise run to the NBA playoffs and was enjoying more goodwill and joyful gifs then was typical of this moribund franchise.

You see, the Nets, as the aforementioned timeline of the Brooklyn Nets suggests, have long been basketball vagabonds. The team has flirted with degrees of success but is often compounded by profound futility whether by management or play itself. That usually manifested in the lack of ability to execute basic basketball concepts such as putting the ball through the basket, preventing the other team from putting the ball through the basket and failing to attract players who can do either of those things at above average levels.

The most recent Nets basketball managerial guffaw was one of the most ill-fated trades in NBA history. Under different leadership, the Nets mortgaged long term stability and success for some aging superstars in an effort to make a big splash in their new Brooklyn home. Needless to say, this decision backfired colossally. The result was a team that was stripped to the studs, rendered a joke and considered left for dead in the league for years to come.

That grim outlook made last year’s playoff run all the more joyful for the players and fans alike. Three seasons after the Nets’ obituary was written, Brooklyn basketball had risen from the ashes to form a functional, competent and fun team that was becoming the envy of the rest of the league. Not to mention that they played fast, scored a ton, and produced a few fantasy gems for us all.

Although the Nets fell short in the playoffs, the feeling around the team was an optimistic one. Gone were the days that the rug would be pulled out from under them. Gone were the days of impulsive decision making and destructive tendencies. ‘Just wait until next season’ was the rally cry.

All the hard work and effort to rebuild the Nets led up to the Summer of 2019. The landscape of the NBA would shake up completely. That would be the summer when the league’s superstars would change addresses and some lucky teams would be new employers for a few of the greatest basketball players the world has ever known.

Two of those players would choose to play in Brooklyn. ‘Just wait until next season.’

The hard work and laser focus on long term plans set by General Manager Sean Marks paid off. The player development paid off. The culture paid off. The Nets, these Brooklyn Nets, formerly known as the Nets that sold Julius Erving to the Philadelphia 76ers, the Whoop-de-damn-do New Jersey Nets, the “Trade Me” sneakers Nets, the ‘Kobe Bryant won’t play a minute in New Jersey’ so says John Calipari Nets, the ‘we should call the team the Swamp Dragons’ Nets, the ‘right to swap picks in 2017 in addition to the 2016 and 2018 1st round picks we’re including’ Nets were finally on a path not just to relevancy, but long term and championship caliber sustainability.

But as you already figured out, this isn’t a love story heading toward a happy ending.

The Stars

For fans who have suffered with this team for most of their lives, the thought of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving donning their team’s jersey was literally Christmas in July. Two of the best ever picked Brooklyn. The rest of it didn’t matter. They chose us. The Nets had arrived.

There was only one problem: Kevin Durant would not play a single game this season.

The Nets signed Durant knowing he would need to rehab his Achillies injury suffered in the playoffs but again, there was a plan, and the Nets and Durant would stick to it. Yes, some rumors crept up about his availability but Durant was always quick to shoot them down. ‘Just wait until next season.’ It was starting to feel like ‘just wait until next season’ was becoming the theme every season.

And next season will be interesting. How much will Durant have left in the tank after a significant and typically career-altering injury? With the exception of one injury-marred season in Oklahoma City, Durant has been one of the best, if not THE best fantasy player in the league. The question is how high will fantasy owners need to pick in order to take on the risk that Durant, entering his age-32 season and coming off an injury that has ruined the careers of very good NBA players, will remain one of the best players in NBA history?

The other star is Kyrie Irving. A whirling dervish of offensive moves and pinball-like abilities, Irving’s talent has never been questioned. His health and motivations always have. But the Nets were Irving’s team growing up in New Jersey and there would be plenty of opportunity to lead while Durant would be sidelined. There would be scoring in bunches, including a pair of 50-point games, and tons of ooh and aahs from the Brooklyn Brigade.

Irving’s shoulder only lasted 20 games. Despite Irving’s prodigious talents, he’s simply never been able to maintain long term health.

The per-game stats were tantalizing. Irving averaged the highest scoring, rebounding, and 3-point output of his entire career. His percentages were right in line with his career averages, which is to say they were amazing. Despite all of the incredible usage-heavy and high shooting volume guards there are in the league, the only player to have more usage and a better FG% than Kyrie Irving this season was Giannis Antetokounmpo. All of this added up to a top-5 per game value season.

But again, health matters. Top-5 per game abilities mean very little if they aren’t demonstrated on a court. Then there’s the matter of Durant’s return and what is going to happen (foreshadowing alert!) now that Kyrie has, again, gone from having a protagonist narrative toward a heel turn as someone who makes teams worse and someone who doesn’t take well to coaching.

With that now in the foreground, asking Irving for another top-5 per game season would be lunacy. Asking for a top-20 per game season depends on what becomes of the other supporting Nets characters. Throw in the fact that in nine professional seasons, Irving has only played in over 70 games three times then you have what will almost assuredly be one of the riskiest early draft day investments you’ll see next season.

The Supporting Actors

A supporting cast is required to play to the stars’ strengths. Fortunately, the Nets largely maintained the one that pushed them to a surprise playoff appearance. The ultimate question was how this ensemble of unknowns, built on chemistry and cohesion, would react to new stars joining the team. It would be like if after season one of Game of Thrones, where the cast were largely unfamiliar to audiences but played to the script perfectly, the directors decided that season two would see the inclusion of Leonardo DiCaprio, Will Smith, and The Rock as primary cast members.

Sure it might be awkward at first, but you don’t just add some of the greatest at their profession and don’t expect everyone to improve, right? Right?

Caris LeVert was someone with hopes of making another leap toward stardom. He looked like an All-Star in the making before his severe ankle injury from November 2018. After nearly an entire season getting back to full health, it looked like that caliber of player could return after his first playoff appearance. Kevin Durant himself even gushed over LeVert’s game and while it was probably not THE reason for his signing, it certainly was A reason.

On the surface, LeVert has been on his way to the statistical ascension that everyone was hoping for. He averaged career highs in PPG, 3PG, 3P%, and REB while chipping in over four AST and one STL per game. Sounds pretty delightful and right on the trajectory we all expected.

Except that the scoring largely came because Irving missed so much time and the Nets had no one outside of Spencer Dinwiddie to create offense with Irving out. That led to a lot of Caris trying to do things that Caris shouldn’t be doing.

His mid-range attempts rocketed and those shots did not fall. Despite shooting a very good 38% from deep, his FG% was the lowest of his career at 41.4%. A couple of clicks on NBA.com/stats shows that only one player took more shots per game than LeVert from 5-9 feet and had a worse percentage (Marvin Bagley Jr.) and only one other player took more shots from 10-14 feet and had a worse percentage (Kristaps Porzingis). LeVert was trying to do Kyrie things, except Kyrie is a mid-range marvel and has been knocking those shots down over half the time for most of his career.

Let’s also not forget that we tend to think of LeVert as a newly planted seed who just needs time to blossom — LeVert is 25 years old and has had major injury red flags, including a six-week absence this season due to a torn thumb ligament. Even with the popcorn, the putrid percentages from the field and stripe means that LeVert has yet to be a top-150 per game player despite the hype train locomotive leaving the station for two consecutive seasons.

In both style of play and statistical output, his game resembles Andrew Wiggins and there isn’t a fantasy player alive who would be excited by that comp. So now the Nets have to decide whether or not LeVert is part of their core or will he suffer the same fate as Wiggins did this past season.

Next up we have Spencer Dinwiddie, who has been the lynchpin of the Nets’ turnaround. Dinwiddie’s career was left for dead until three seasons ago when all of the Nets point guards were either injured or terrible and Sean Marks was desperately trying to unearth any gem he could find. Marks may as well hit a progressive jackpot when he signed Dinwiddie, who turned himself into a leader and elevated his teammates. No Dinwiddie means no Nets playoff run last year or this year, plain and simple.

This season, Dinwiddie turned himself into a 20-PPG scorer with nearly 7.0 APG and 3.5 RPG. Flashy numbers for sure but that’s about where the positivity ends. Dinwiddie was the primary ball handler with Irving and LeVert hurt and while that resulted in a career high in usage, his FG% dipped to 41.5% and his 30.8 3P% represented a regression from an already below average clip from deep. His 2.7 TPG was also a career high and the percentages and lack of defense were all bad enough to just barely get him into the top-150 per game in 9-cat leagues despite the big bump in counting stats.

Even that high of a ranking was due to a six-week stretch with both Irving and LeVert out from mid-November through New Years when Dinwiddie went Supernova while averaging 26 PPG and garnering serious consideration for an All-Star nod.

The usage slowed when Irving and LeVert returned, but the idea that Dinwiddie disappeared when sharing the ball with D’Angelo Russell didn’t hold true with Irving. Both Irving and Dinwiddie had the highest two-man Offensive Rating on the team with a minimum of 100 minutes on the floor together; we just didn’t get to see if that pairing could hold more than 20 games.

We also can’t discount that Dinwiddie was also influential in bringing Kyrie and KD to Brooklyn. Even though Kyrie and Dinwiddie appear on paper to be able to coexist, the front office might want to see if they can capitalize on Dinwiddie’s value now for some much needed outside shooting, which happens to be Spence’s biggest liability.

No matter if he stays or goes, the book on Dinwiddie might be written even with all the strides he’s made in his career. He can be a strong floor leader and slasher but is never going to be a great shooter and doesn’t contribute much on the defensive end despite generally having a size advantage on opposing point guards. Even if a team were to hand him the keys, whether through acquisition or injury, he’s going to remain a net negative in more than half the fantasy categories available to you.

Joe Harris is another winning ticket that Sean Marks was able to punch. He is a bit of a one trick pony but that trick is going to net him a massive pay upgrade and is perfectly suitable for most fantasy leagues as a premier 3-point shooter. If you can shoot from deep with high enough volume and great percentages, you’ll always have a place on real and fantasy rosters. Harris has the ability to fit neatly into this category.

Asking Harris to replicate his career season where he led the league in 3P% and won the Three Point Shootout at All-Star Weekend was asking for too much. His 41.2% from deep this season remains outstanding and is among the top-15 in the entire league. However, any year to year regression in efficiency from deep was bound to affect his FG% negatively which is exactly what happened. Joey Hoops also went from being an 83% shooter from the stripe to a 75% one just to compound matters. Even with the loss of Irving and LeVert for a chunk of the season, Harris didn’t see an increase in volume either.

All told, Harris was a total value top-100 player on the season but well below that on a per-game basis. He remains plenty rosterable on fantasy teams because of his skill set but he’s really a great example of why you can stream for 3s late in drafts.

Despite his limited offensive game and defensive abilities, he’s set up for a nice raise from his current or future employers in unrestricted free agency. Both Harris and the Nets would love nothing more than to keep the relationship going. The problem is that lovable characters get whacked in TV shows all the time and the same thing can happen with basketball in Brooklyn. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of business.

Business was supposed to be better for Taurean Prince. While he isn’t a star, he was a new face that came to the team by trade just prior to the big summer spending binge. Prince had been a Nets target for some time and his skill set fit the team perfectly. The Nets wouldn’t have a clear 4 with KD injured and they needed someone to be the primary defender of the NBA’s best wings. We have always sung Prince’s praises here at the Hoob and with a fresh start, a ton of minutes in front of him and an injury-riddled season behind him he was practically free in drafts. The stars aligned for a big season for Prince, the Nets and fantasy players alike.

Prince’s play had other plans.

This season, Prince couldn’t hit the East River if he threw a basketball off the Williamsburg. His 37.6 FG% was easily the worst of his career. There are plenty of bad shooters in the league, but Prince was a high-volume trainwreck. Eric Gordon was the only NBA player to have a worse FG% with more shot attempts per game. In terms of fantasy value, only Devonte’ Graham’s FG% was more detrimental to fantasy teams than Prince’s. At least Graham could make up for that with over 18 points, seven dimes and three triples a night. Prince can only dream of that kind of offensive usage.

On defense Prince does all the right things that don’t show up in a box score. He takes on the likes of your PG-13s and LeBrons without complaint and his 3-point defense is above average. Those things are nice for real basketball but when your steal and block rates also hit career lows then it doesn’t matter how well you can defend on the perimeter for fantasy purposes.

Prince will be another player who will appear in trade rumors if the Nets decide to go star hunting once again. On one hand it would be selling low on a player entering his prime who can’t possibly shoot as poorly as he did this season. On the other, he’ll take an even bigger back seat to a healthy Durant and Prince’s stroke could then go from broken to non-existent. Either way, you’re probably only drafting him in fantasy leagues if you really believe in Prince’s abilities and think he can find a way into 30 minutes a game on what will be an increasingly crowded team.

We invest in supporting characters when they have a good story to tell and Jarrett Allen’s should tug at our heartstrings. Allen was tapped as a breakout player last season and while the hype train got itself a little too much steam, he delivered on his promise of growth in his second season. The Fro was putting up great traditional big man numbers in scoring, rebounding, blocks and field goal percentage without crushing you at the charity stripe. The kid would be going into his age-21 season with an already impressive fantasy resume, a chance for growth, and a hit list of players who he’s already Mutombo’d that would make even Mutombo envious.

This season, if we’re being optimistic we can point to Allen being a better rebounder and his FG% going from very good to elite. Nabbing nearly 10 boards a game on 65% shooting is drool worthy. Not to mention a stretch when, again, Irving and LeVert were out and Allen went absolutely ham on the league to top-25 value over that 6-week stretch. If we’re being neutral, Allen kept up double digit per game scoring and 1.3 blocks per contest. He is still prone to inconsistency but was able to maintain top-100 value throughout the season.

If we’re being pessimistic, Allen became dreadful at the line, which was an area we all thought was a previous strength. Not to mention that any hope of Allen developing a shot from outside has been all but dashed.

If we’re being Chicken Little, we can say that the sky fell once DeAndre Jordan arrived.

You see, you don’t just hand out a massive contract to someone who’s best work is behind him just to ensure his superstar friends join him without it affecting someone else. Initially, the wisdom was that Jordan would be a perfect complement to Allen. There isn’t a center in the league who could bully the former All-Defensive stud, a spot where Allen struggles against the likes of Joel Embiid and Andre Drummond. Jordan could come off the bench, chip in some excellent per minute boarding, strong field goal percentage and defense to the tune of a roughly top-100 player that you could stream on an as-needed basis and the Nets could play matchup ball with. There was only one problem: apparently, DeAndre Jordan didn’t like coming off the bench.

Reports of locker room grumbling emerged early and then when the chaos of the season hit its nadir a change was made. Jordan was put into the starting lineup.

It was as clear of a ‘squeaky wheel gets the grease’ situation as can be remembered. The Nets were underachieving but bringing Jordan to the starting lineup isn’t something that is going to fix their shooting and scoring troubles.

To be fair, Allen was also struggling, but as we discussed, he is 21 with a bright future and needs to work through those struggles on a team that isn’t playing for a championship. Jordan is 31 and taking valuable time away from a promising part of a developing core. It doesn’t take a degree in economics to know that the guy that just signed a 4-year, $40 million-dollar deal is going to get the perks that come with that deal as opposed to the young kid who is still an imperfect work in progress but is going to be eligible for an extension in the offseason.

This is what can happen when stars are thrust into a positive but precarious situation. They can suck the air out of room from their play or their egos. If any team isn’t on the same page, enemy teams are going to exploit that.

The goodwill of the Nets’ ensemble run last season is now gone. The players that were the core of a joyful band of misfits found themselves regressing with these new faces thrown in. A leadership vacuum formed, and now the roster is filled with more questions than answers for both their real and fantasy futures. In the span of one season, the players who were thought to be part of a deep and talented team are now uncertain to remain long-term. Only Durant, Irving, and Jordan are locks to be back in the 2020-2021 season. The contract situations for Dinwiddie, Prince and LeVert are just reasonable enough with an Allen extension looming to entice a team to take some combination of them on if it can bring in another superstar.

The Roster

As if the core of the Nets wasn’t mangled enough after the season, the side characters weren’t helping matters either. Even if you’re not fully invested in a side character’s story arc, they still need to provide some semblance of value to a cast or the audience is going to tire of them making constant appearances.

Garrett Temple is a beloved teammate but asking him to play more than 20-or-so minutes and chip in some 3s here and there is asking for trouble. Yet, this is what happens when you have no Durant, no Irving, no LeVert, and other teammates who are allergic to shooting at efficient rates. Temple shooting at below 38% on the season and still getting enough volume to warrant a stream as a borderline top-150 player is neither good for the Nets or fantasy purposes.

Wilson Chandler was suspended for the first 25 games of the season and looked like his typically washed self for the other 35. He was another player brought in to fill the ‘good locker room guy’ void and was a former protégé of Kenny Atkinson during their time with the Knicks. Sadly, Chandler looks like a player who moves about as well as a mother trying to be cool by making a Something New video on their kid’s Tik Tok account. Chandler will be 33 next season so he’s not even old enough for me to mock in a High Mileage report and not even close to relevant enough to merit a selection in any league.

Rodions Kurucs had a breakout rookie season and received some direct comparisons to Andrei Kirilenko in both physicality and potential. There were times that Rodi played like a baby deer on rollerskates but there was no denying the tools he could grow into. He could run, attack, shoot from deep, and was unafraid to let an elbow or two loose on defense. Then Kurucs got arrested over the summer on some very disturbing domestic violence charges and was summarily left in the doghouse by his coach after that news and the very vocal feelings that he should be able to play with the ball in his hands more often. He bounced in and out of the G-League and any hope of building on his surprising rookie season has vanished.

The Nets’ best defensive player was another journeyman that was beginning to become another solid organizational find in David Nwaba. When Nwaba was on the court the Nets’ Defensive Rating was 94.9, and when he was off the court it was 109.7. It might shock you to know that even though the Irving/Dinwiddie two-man combo had the highest Offensive Rating on the team, it was the combination of Dinwiddie and Nwaba that had the highest Net Rating on the team with a minimum of 100 minutes together. It probably won’t shock you know that when Nwaba suffered a torn Achillies, the defense went straight to hell.

After Nwaba went down, Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot signed and the team was desperate enough for some competent wing depth that he was playing nearly 20 minutes a game. He was still unable to crack the top-300 in fantasy leagues.

Nicolas Claxton is another raw but promising rookie who looked a lot like Allen coming out of college but is a project on both sides of the ball. Claxton has a lot of tools and needs a lot of work but is worth keeping an eye on if Allen is sent packing and because DeAndre Jordan shouldn’t be on the floor for longer than 20 minutes a night.

None of this is worth getting exciting about. No one mentioned here, save for a possible Kurucs reclamation is making anyone say, ‘hey I need to see more of that.’

The Coach

Kenny Atkinson had a story perfect for a movie script. A Long Island basketball star who bounced around the minor leagues and international teams just looking to keep his hoop dreams alive. Just when he thought it was all over, the basketball gym rat was offered a coaching job in Paris. His passion for the game and coaching abilities in Paris translated to an offer to be an assistant coach in the NBA. After several years as an assistant the team closest to his hometown offered him the head coaching job.

It was a job no one in their right mind would take. Like we mentioned before, the Nets were a broken team with limited talent and a bleak future. It was the Bad News Bears in tank tops and shorts.

But Atkinson was hired because of his track record in developing players and unleashing skills they may not have realized they had. His attitude was a big part of that as well. He wasn’t afraid to change culture and believed in building through camaraderie and competitiveness. He felt that if he hustled and got his hands dirty, the players would notice and follow. He was right.

Atkinson, along with an analytically driven front office led by Marks, developed his players to run fast, shoot the 3-point shot, and defend the 3-point shot. Atkinson’s team have been in the top-11 in Pace, top-5 in 3PA, and in the past two seasons top-10 in 3P% allowed. Atkinson did what was thought to be impossible in leading the Nets on their improbable playoff run during the 2018-2019 season. Even with the injuries and turmoil this season, Atkinson was on his way to returning to the playoffs yet again. The hometown boy was leading the hometown team and it was just a matter of time before Atkinson could lead a star-studded team toward a championship.

On March 7th, the news broke that Kenny Atkinson would no longer serve as the head coach of the Nets.

The tight-lipped Nets wouldn’t reveal the reason why Atkinson abruptly decided that what could be described as a dream job wasn’t for him. You got the usual platitudes of thanks and mutual decisions and best interests and the team needing a new voice.

That last part is the most striking. We may never know the real reason for Atkinson’s departure but a lot of change and the influx of stars can create messy fits. Indeed, new voices may be needed and when the personalities of Durant, Irving, and Jordan are involved, perhaps camaraderie and competition isn’t what was needed at practices.

But make no mistake, If KD, Kyrie and DJ wanted Atkinson there, he would still be there. We can excuse KD’s role in all of this. After all, he didn’t play at all this season. But there is once again a glaring spotlight on Kyrie Irving and his reputation as an enigmatic locker room presence and someone who still won’t allow his basketball superpowers to be harnessed for the greater good.

So Jacque Vaughn will lead the Nets, if only temporarily. New names will be bandied about in the news. If and when a new season begins, the Nets will have a new leader at the head of their bench. But this story isn’t going to have a Norman Dale, Morris Buttermaker, Gordon Bombay, or Herb Brooks. No, this story went off script and it’s going to have to replace a leader if the Nets are to remain on the same trajectory that Atkinson had them on.

The Chaos

Like we asked earlier, ‘How did we get here?’

We got here from a conscious decision to make a drastic change to the team by bringing in Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and DeAndre Jordan. We got here knowing that KD wouldn’t play and Kyrie would miss time. We got here when the group that carried this team once before couldn’t do it again. We got here when the role players, veterans, and young guys all couldn’t provide the needed support. We got here when it was determined that the leader of this group couldn’t lead them anymore.

This is the definition of chaos. The Nets went from the gold standard of culture building, stability, and growth to pure uncertainty in one season. It can happen that quickly in this league.

More changes are coming. A new coach and new moves to the roster. You don’t sign KD and Kyrie with the goal being a championship and not do everything in your power to make that happen. The Nets will now have a 3-year window to make that a reality.

And this is the part where the heroes need to look at themselves and determine what exactly they want to be. They are battered and bruised. They need a new voice to lead them, be it Tyronn Lue, a Van Gundy or even a longshot Hail Mary move like prying Gregg Popovich from San Antonio.

But now is the time to lick the wounds and get up and resolve to be better. Kevin Durant might not be at the peak of his powers, but even a slightly hobbled Durant is an All-Star. Kyrie Irving needs to be on the court and figure out how to mesh with both KD and the rest of the roster. The Nets’ supporting cast will need to either fix their shots or have the right replacements found that can.

We’ve hit the adversity point in the film. This is now what we pay money to go see. Our heroes can now overcome that adversity and soar to new heights or they can find themselves with even more adversity to overcome. Whenever this movie starts up again, it’ll be one the league and everyone else will find worth watching.