The Brooklyn Nets have left us with more questions than answers

We learned some valuable lessons from the historic first round of Brooklyn’s 2025 NBA Draft. I wish we learned different ones.

The Brooklyn Nets had an unbelievable first round of the 2025 NBA Draft. It was an unbelievable, official start to the rebuild that was announced one year ago with the Mikal Bridges and Houston Rockets trades but had to wait to truly get started until Wednesday night.

Yes, unbelievable. Both while it was happening and now, the morning after. If you missed it, we have updated each of our individual stories on each of the unprecedented five first-round picks Brooklyn made, with quotes and highlights galore for each of them. More detailed scouting reports on Nolan Traoré, Drake Powell, Ben Saraf, and Danny Wolf are coming soon, though Egor Demin’s is already available here.

Still, I am just some guy and because NBA drafting is already a guessing game that qualified though inexact scientists whiff on all the time, let’s zoom out and take the objective view first.

Character counts

Again, if you missed it, Brooklyn made an unprecedented five first-round picks on Wednesday night. It was not only the most first picks in Nets history but NBA history as well. Patterns emerged just within those three (dragged out) hours. And the open window into the process of GM Sean Marks and the scouting department showed that Brooklyn’s decision-makers really care about character. As B.J. Johnson said in SCOUT, the internally produced docu-series, the Nets expect any next Net will have to adjust to the Nets, not the other way around.

It came up every time Marks, in his post-round presser on Zoom, mentioned a prospect by name. And when he was asked if there were any overarching takeaways for all five players, he responded, “We’re looking for guys who have the qualities we’re looking for: high character, competitive individuals who play the right brand of basketball.”

Egor Demin, the most consequential pick of the night, does not go in the lottery if he did not ace his pre-draft process, from shooting drills to the interviews.

“I loved just how hard a worker he is,” said Marks. “I saw him up close and personal in his individual workouts and other workouts that we had here with the group, and was able to compare what we saw during the season to what we saw now, and the uptick and the improvement that we saw was pretty outstanding. So I know he’s a class act of a young man, but he’s also a real worker, and that’s exciting for me, when the guy’s going to put in the due diligence.”

(The Athletic’s Sam Vecenie, reacting to Brooklyn’s #8 overall pick on his draft livestream, may have put it more succinctly: “This is the best pro day in the history of basketball, basically.”)

On Drake Powell, the #22 overall pick, Marks said: “When he was in here for his workouts, and you do a lot of the testing and so forth, you see him up close and personal and figure out what a class act and what a great young man he is. And you get to add that not only into your on-the-court family, but your off-court family. I mean, he fits exactly what we’re all about.”

Nolan Traoré, taken just three spots earlier, received a different flavor of the same compliment: “I loved his straight line speed in breaking down that pick and roll. But I also looked at, how did he communicate with his teammates? And for a young guy like that to be talking, you know, to veterans, even if they are over in Europe, and demanding the respect that he had, I think that was pretty unique. So for a young guy like that to command the respect of his teammates was certainly unique and something that stood out to us.”

The “culture” stuff is no joke inside the walls of HSS. It doesn’t just matter to Brooklyn’s front office, but may play a far bigger role in their decision-making than many other NBA teams. Talking to sources around the league, this theory gets closer to fact. A response to the troubles caused by the Big Three’s personality issues? You decide.

Without the assurance of high-level character, at least in Brooklyn’s estimation, they probably don’t feel comfortable taking three point guards who ostensibly need each other’s minutes to improve.

A new philosophy emerges

In year one of his reign in Brooklyn, Jordi Fernández implemented a side-to-side offense that ranked fifth in the NBA in passes per game, and fifth in 3-point attempt rate. They ranked #1 in the NBA in ball-screens/dribble-handoffs, often initiated in 5-out spacing. Dribble, drive, kick, repeat.

Said Fernández back in November: “The ball has energy, and I think if everybody touches the ball, everybody feels better. So that’s important for us, touching the paint is important.”

Fast-forward to June, and the front office went nuts on passing feel. How about this stat from Jerry Engelmann?

Drake Powell is a major outlier in Brooklyn’s draft class. He had one of the lowest usage rates in all of high-major NCAA basketball last year, but the five-star 2024 recruit posted decent shooting numbers and has awesome, athleticism-based defensive potential.

As for the other four, they’re gonna look for their teammates and swing the rock, even if they don’t seem likely to play with each other all at once (although none of us expected them to take five picks either.)

Though, to that point, Marks did mention that he views Traoré and Demin as compatible backcourt partners: “I think we’d love to see both of them play together, for sure. I think we always look at it a little bit of best player available at that particular time … But, you know, I think we’ve got to be very careful penciling a player into being a certain position, or playing a certain way when they’re 19 years old.”

Much like the Indiana Pacers clawing their way to within one win, or snapped achilles, of a championship, the bet here is that high-feel players who make quick decisions just figure it out. They figure out how to play with each other, then how to beat the opponent.

Who was the best passing prospect Sean Marks drafted in his tenure as Nets GM prior to Wednesday night? Caris LeVert?

Perhaps Jordi Fernández had serious sway in the war room, or perhaps Marks is taken with the offense Fernández implemented last season. Maybe the strategy was simply to throw three darts at a Tyrese Haliburton-sized dartboard and hope one lands.

But one thing is for sure: It’s a new era in Brooklyn.

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I think that was all pretty objective. Here are my own thoughts.

Egor Demin had the quote of the night…

… and seems like a very nice teenager who is suddenly the face of a rebuilding NBA franchise 5,000 miles away from his hometown of Moscow. Somebody has to take him down to Tatiana in Brighton Beach for some Solyanka, red wine, and impromptu clubbing. (I’ll gladly step up and do it.)

So I sincerely hope he never reads this, and that we can all look back in five years and laugh at the idiocy of the following sentence: It is an unfathomable pick at #8. His best games as a BYU Cougar came against Idaho, UC Riverside, and Central Arkansas as cupcake non-conference opponents. I’m not gonna repeat my whole Demin piece but I will repeat these stats:

• In 17 games against top-50 NCAA teams, he posted a total of 57 turnovers to 66 made baskets.
• In 20 conference games, at 6’8 barefoot, he grabbed three offensive rebounds.

If the 27.3% shooter can really makes threes at the next level, it absolutely changes his long-term outlook, and under Fernández, he’ll get those shots up next year. But that is not Demin’s only issue. Just look at how Vecenie and Bryce Simon react, for example, on the aforementioned livestream…

It set the tone for the whole night, the most important night for the franchise since Game 7 of the 2021 Eastern Conference Semifinals. The earth-shattering trades that would later set the franchise on its current path had their own backstories that took place over many previous days, in the shadows.

This day — June 25, 2025 — like the Toe On The Line Day, was monumental all on its own. It was the true start of the next era of Nets basketball, and unlike that painful, on-court loss, everything was within Brooklyn’s control here.

So when they picked Nolan Traoré at #19, another pass-first point guard who can at least explode by people but, again, can’t really shoot (yet), it wouldn’t have been so bad on its own merits. After Demin, it felt like a cruel joke.

Powell is cool, if a slight reach. If you believe in the shot — and I can more easily be convinced of that than the other prospects — it’s not so bad.

Ben Saraf at #26 would have been totally fine, had he not been the third ball-dominant guard of the night who needs to hike himself up to 30% 3-point shooting and a 70% clip from the line. Danny Wolf ends up being the best value pick of the night, and the highest-rated prospect of the five guys they took, on more than a few boards.

“Insanity,” said one well-traveled league source. That’s the full quote.

“Bewildering,” said another.

One, with a slightly more positive but more cutting disposition: “I like some of the players, to be honest, but you’re having them eat each other if they are all on the same roster.”

That’s what it comes down to. None of their picks felt like plus-value, and they don’t even fit together. The odds of Demin, Traoré, and Saraf all developing into good NBA players was slim enough, but on the same team it’s microscopic. Jordi Fernández is great, but is he a miracle worker?

Thanks to their quantity of picks and the ESPN broadcast, viewers were treated to constant cutaways of Brooklyn’s jubilant war room. It looked like the happiest room in hoop. Oblivious to the outside world, and apparently to the sort of basketball opinions that had Brian Windhorst laughing at them on national television, I grew quite envious…

My silver lining for Brooklyn’s 2025 NBA Draft, which is not over given their impending pick at #36 on Thursday night, is that it reminded us how quickly fortunes change.

One year ago, I stood at the nearly empty platform of the Belmont stop on LIRR, headed for home well after midnight on the night of the WNBA Commissioner’s Cup. The New York Liberty lost a great game to the Minnesota Lynx, but during the fourth quarter, Sean Marks engineered the most lopsided pick-for-player package in NBA history, then deftly pivoted to regain control of the Nets’ next two drafts.

The franchise was saved.

I was ready for that saving to begin in earnest when I walked into Barclays Center on Wednesday night after covering a 26-56 season littered with two-way contracts and blowouts.

I walked out dreading the next one. Here’s to being wrong.