NetsDaily Off-Season Report – No. 3

Every weekend, we’ll be updating the Nets’ off-season with bits and pieces of information, gossip, etc. to help fans get ready for … whatever.

Another week of anxious waiting approaches. So, in the interim, let’s get nerdy!

The NBA Draft Lottery is a week from Monday night when a year of trades and tanking will finally pay off … or not. That night, at halftime of a playoff game that night, Mark Tatum will draw cards each with team logos from oversized envelopes and NetsWorld will know where they’ll pick between No. 1 (a 9.0%) chance and No. 10 (a 0.2% chance) … but not No. 5. According to the odds, the Nets most likely will pick at No. 7 (29.7%), followed by No. 8 (20.6%) and No. 3 (9.4%.)

The lottery will not just determine not where the Nets will pick in the lottery this year, but also when they’ll be able to use the last payment from the 2021 James Harden trade. If the 76ers finish 7th or worse, their pick goes to Oklahoma City and as part of the deal the 1-8 protected first rounder Philly owes the Nets will get used in 2027. If, on the other hand, the 76ers retain their own pick after the lottery, the pick owed the Nets drops back to 2028. And if that happens, it gets really complicated.

Maybe we wait till 2028 to see IF that happens. it would be better for Brooklyn if OKC walks away with the Sixers lottery pick this year. Here’s why: if the Nets get the pick in 2027 but the Sixers are bad and retain the pick in that draft, said pick rolls over into 2028. So the Nets would get two shots. But in the other scenario, where they get the pick in 2028, they have only one shot. (In either case, if in 2028, the Nets don’t the the Philly first, they’ll wind up with two seconds and some cash.)

The other point of interest for Nets fans is where the Rockets pick with the Suns first which fell into the lottery as the Phoenix Big Three collapsed late. Houston acquired the Suns pick from the Nets back on June 25 in the two teams monumental if controversial exchange of future firsts. With the ninth worst record, the Suns pick has a 3.8% chance of getting to No. 1 and a 17.4% chance of rewarding Rockets GM Rafael Stone with a top four pick. However, according to the odds, the Rockets are far more likely to land at No. 9, where their chances are 50.7% or No. 10 where they’re 28.3%.

A historical footnote: As we all know, this will be the first time the Nets will wind up with a lottery pick since 2010 when they got the overall No. 3 pick and took Derrick Favors. But that’s not the last time a Nets rep actually sat on the dias in Chicago. In 2012, the Nets had sent their first rounder to Portland, but the pick was protected top 3. So Irina Pavlova, then president of Prokhorov’s ONEXIM Sports & Entertainment, sat on the dias. The pick fell to No. 6, the Nets lost the pick and the Blazers took a mid-major guard from Weber State named Dame Lillard. (And no, the Nets would not have picked Lillard if they had retained the pick. They liked Anthony Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist (!) and Thomas Robinson (!!). Lillard wasn’t in their top six.)

Beyond the nerd talk, Adam Silver spoke this week on a fan podcast about the value of high draft picks on team futures. Reminder, he said “high,” not the overall No. 1.

“When a perceived high-value class comes along — this is a great example — analytics tell a certain story to teams, and that is that there’s nothing like a high draft pick if you want to change your fortunes and rebuild your team,” Silver said as Brian Lewis wrote Sunday.

“In some cases, you have fans saying to teams, ‘What are you doing? You don’t want to finish in the middle of the pack. You’re better off the worse.’ That used to never be the case in the old days. But the fans are sophisticated, too, and they’re saying, ‘Look who’s coming in the draft. You’re better off finishing down the standings.’

“At least now with the draft lottery and the flattened odds, teams can demonstrate it’s still a true long shot.”

What was interesting, at least to us, is that there was no indication in Silver’s comments that league is going to do much if anything to stop the rampant tanking we saw this season and is likely again next season with another strong if not as deep draft class.

Round one exits

The three rotation players the Nets dumped during the season, Dennis Schroder, Dorian Finney-Smith and Ben Simmons, are all Cancun-bound. Schroder who got shuffled from Brooklyn to Golden State to Detroit, was sent packing by the Knicks; DFS who played well in L.A. for the Lakers, got bounced by the Timberwolves while Ben Simmons is literally going fishing after he didn’t play in Game 7 Sunday vs. the Nuggets (after not playing in game 6 either. More ignominy for Ben10.)

Schroder who played well for both Brooklyn and Detroit and Simmons who did not are both unrestricted free agents. DFS has a player option at $15.4 million next season but in his exit interview he claimed he hasn’t really thought about it.

“No, not really,” Finney-Smith said. “[I was] just trying to get to the second round, man. I’ll worry about that around the draft and summer league and all that stuff.”

DFS turned 32 Sunday. Happy birthday, Dorian.

Draft Sleeper of the Week

It’s getting tight at the top of the first round. After four players — Cooper Flagg, Dylan Harper, Ace Bailey and V.J. Edgecombe —were seen all season as the top of the top in a deep draft, mock drafts of late have become a jumble with players like Jeremiah Fears, Tre Johnson, Khaman Maluach and Kon Knueppel bumping up against the top echelon. In fact, three new mock drafts, SB Nation, The Athletic, and NBADraft.net have Bailey dropping below Edgecombe and Knueppel (SB Nation), Johnson and Edgecombe (The Athletic) and Edgecombe (NBADraft.) Meanwhile, international players are starting to rise, particularly the French.

Of all the fast risers, the two of the most intriguing are Fears, last week’s Draft Sleeper, and this week’s: Tre Johnson of Texas.

Jonathan Givony of Draft Express and ESPN spent time recently with Johnson in Santa Monica where he’s been working out since the end of the Longhorns’ season…

One of the older freshman in the 2025 Draft class, Johnson has a reputation for discipline, maturity and oh yeah, shooting, shooting, shooting.

In a discussion of some of the prospects with Malika Andrews after his return, Givony was asked who beyond Flagg had impressed him.

“A guy who really stood out to me is Tre Johnson in Santa Barbara,” said Givony who’s tracked the NBA Draft for 20 years. “He’s been there for four and a half weeks. He’s already taken over 30,000 shots in that span. They track every shot he has taken and, Malika, he has not missed many of those shots from what I saw with my own eyes. 6’6”, huge wingspan (6’10”) incredible shot making prowess, range, ability to come off screens, shoot off the dribble

“But what really impressed me the most was the laser focus that he has in the pre-draft process with the attention to detail that goes into working on his body every day, working on his mind and working on his craft. Tre Johnson is a guy I can’t wait to see at the NBA Combine next week.”

Sam Vecenie of The Athletic also made the tour of workout camps and posted a rave similar to Givony’s in justifying mocking him ahead of everyone but Flagg and Harper.

Johnson was the most impressive player I saw working out during my trip to the U.S. He had one of the best shooting workouts I’ve ever seen from a teenage player, showcasing a serious-minded intentionality about how he goes about his craft. He displayed the ability to hit shots off movement at a high level, something that he rarely got the chance to do in an offensive scheme at Texas that could be charitably described as anachronistic but fairly described as hideously archaic.

Johnson isn’t all potential like a lot of his classmates. He is already an accomplished prospect, leading the SEC in scoring at 19.9 ppg on shooting splits of 43/40/87 despite the limitations Vecenie cited. There are questions about his strength and defense, as Isaiah Maldonado of NBADraft wrote, but the overall package is impressive. Interestingly, Maldonado compared Johnson to Cam Thomas.

Here’s the requisite highlights:

We don’t have specifics about how many times the Nets scouted Johnson at Texas but back in November they got a very close-up view of him. Texas, in the New York for a game at the Garden, practiced at HSS Training Center, a frequent stop for top college teams playing in the city…

Ya gotta think with the Nets offensive limitations, Johnson has to be on the Nets short list if they wind picking No. 3 or later.

Final Note

Lucas Kaplan wrote this week of Clara Wu Tsai’s hour-long Q&A at Columbia Business School on April 8. She had been awarded the school’s Botwinick Prize for Business Ethics. In it, she discussed in detail how she and husband Joe got involved with the New York Liberty back in late 2018 and early 2019. The Tsai family investment office, Blue Pool Capital, had already invested in a 49% stake in the Brooklyn Nets and were going to take full control in the months ahead. At the time, they had no interest in the WNBA.

As she recounted, that changed when Adam Silver and his No. 2, Mark Tatum, called on them.

“The previous owner had put it up for sale in 2017, and by 2018 he couldn’t wait, and they moved the team to Westchester County Center,” said Wu Tsai referring to James Dolan. Indeed, Westchester was the third building the Liberty had played in over the previous decade under Dolan’s reign following Prudential Center and the Garden.

“It was kind of just, you know, just languishing. And of course, yes, by that point, the investment had stopped, as I mentioned. And the team was — well, all the numbers were declining, it was losing money. And so at that point, Adam [Silver] and [NBA Deputy Commissioner] Mark Tatum called us and said, ‘Hey you know, would you have a look at it?’”

After running the numbers, buying the Liberty for trinkets and baubles, and moving them to Brooklyn, the franchise won its first WNBA championship within five years and the value of the franchise now has be around $250 million.

But beyond the success of the Libs, the story is just another indicator of how much the NBA and Silver has come to rely on Joe and Clara Wu Tsai.

The big deal for the league, of course, is the NBA’s return to China which Joe Tsai played a big role after a six-year hiatus born of a 2019 controversy that began with a Daryl Morey tweet encouraging a free Hong Kong. He will be rewarded in October when the Brooklyn Nets fly to Macao, the entertainment capital of south China, for two preseason games with the Suns. It’s part of a $125 million deal between China and the NBA that will bring teams to both Macau and the nearby city of Zuhai over the next five years. Doesn’t hurt that Asian TV right are up soon.

To commemorate the deal back in December, six former NBA stars participated in a celebrity game at the Venetian in Macao where the Nets-Suns games will be played. Former Net and Chinese Basketball Association star Stephon Marbury was among those on the court. So was Joe Tsai…

Also, the Tsais role in the WNBA is not limited to the Liberty. In 2022, the NBA agreed to restructure ownership of the women’s league by selling a 16% stake in the W to a group of investors that included Nike, Michael Dell of Dell Computers, Linda Henry, Boston Globe chairman and sports executive; Dee Haslam, part owner of the Cleveland Brown; former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Miami Heat owner Micky Arison and Laurene Powell Jobs … as well as the Tsais. The W needed the money “to address some of the league’s obstacles to growth and generating new revenue.” (And this was after the WNBA had fined the Tsais $500,000 for covertly chartering flights for Liberty players! As one BSE Global exec said of the fine, “that wasn’t a fine; it was an investment,” in that players saw the Tsais’ desire to improve their amenities as an enticement, not a sanction.)

In fact, the Tsais along with Ted Leonsis of the Washington Wizards and Mystics are the only people with interests in the three entities that control ownership of the WNBA: the owners of 30 NBA teams, the owners of 13 WNBA teams and the 2022 investment group.

Bottom line in the NBA, the WNBA, China, etc: It’s been Joe and Clara Wu Tsai to the rescue on countless occasions. As Clara told the Columbia Business School, Silver has given the Tsais a number of compliments of late. And no, as Lucas wrote, we are not endorsing any conspiracy theory that the lottery will be rigged to help the Nets. On the other hand, the commissioner probably wouldn’t be upset either if the Nets won it.