No surprises. Nets get (mostly) low grades for the still incomplete off-season.
The Brooklyn Nets took a lot of heat after the NBA Draft as pundits — and their league sources — saw what they had done: not just using the four first rounders they had going into the night before the Draft, but adding one in a trade! There were reports that other tam offices were laughing with each of the Nets picks.
They didn’t like the unconventional and indeed historic decision to use all the picks, didn’t like that they used three (or four depending on how you view a point center) on prospects who run the point, in particularly didn’t like using the No. 8 pick on Egor Demin, the big Russian guard.
Now, with free agency into its fourth week, they don’t like how the Nets used their equally historic stash of cap space either. It was as high as $60 million and now still sits between $22 and $28 million with flexibility to go even higher.
We’ve gathered up some of the latest takes but know this is not a safe place.
Kevin Pelton who grades everything for ESPN has given Sean Marks & co. what could be considered a mid-term grade of C-.
Given the Nets’ commanding position as the only team with more than $30 million in cap space this summer, their return has been underwhelming. Brooklyn did net a 2032 unprotected first-rounder from Denver and can hope to rehabilitate Michael Porter Jr.’s value. The Nets also landed the No. 22 pick with Terance Mann prior to the draft, but keeping all five first-round picks and using them largely on players whose games don’t seem complementary was confusing. Brooklyn still can create $20-plus million in cap space, and we’ll see whether additional deals materialize before training camp.
So, Kevin, you’re telling us there’s a chance!
Ben Rohrbach of Yahoo! Sports also graded the whole off-season. He gave the Nets a worse grade than Pelton, a D.
The Nets entered this offseason with more picks in the first round of the 2025 NBA Draft and more salary cap space than any other team. This forewarned us of a summer of significant change, or so we thought.
Brooklyn used each one of its draft picks, not consolidating any of them and even adding another one, absorbing Terance Mann’s contract into cap space in exchange for a fifth first-rounder. Who knows if there is a star among them. There will certainly be plenty of competition for the ball among five rookies.
The ball might be available to them more often, too, if the Nets cannot come to terms with restricted free agent Cam Thomas. They also traded their second-leading scorer, Cam Johnson, turning the two years and $44 million left on his contract into two years and $79 million worth of Michael Porter Jr., the oft-injured former Denver Nugget. And they picked up another first-round pick in 2032 for that trouble.
And yes, the “oft-injured” MPJ missed a total of six games over the past two seasons while CamJ missed 43.
John Hollinger who toils for The Athletic/New York Times after a gig in the Memphis Grizzlies front office and before that ESPN, ranked rookies’ Summer League performance. He was not impressed by the Nets quartet.
Four of the Nets’ five first-round picks played in Vegas (we never saw Drake Powell), and wow, this was not good.
Two of the three worst-performing first-rounders by PER were Nets imports Nolan Traoré and Ben Saraf, while fellow first-rounders Danny Wolf and Egor Demin weren’t much better. Given that many league observers already had questions about Brooklyn’s choices and strategy on draft night, this was not a great kickoff.
While some of these struggles can be written off as shooting variance, Traoré, in particular, looked overmatched. The guard prospect didn’t have a single steal or block in his 67 minutes and only shot 7 of 23 from the field in his three games. Saraf had identical shooting numbers but at least spiked his box score with some promising defense and playmaking.
One other thing that became obvious while watching these guys try to play together was how poorly they fit with one another. All four of the first-rounders who played are guys who need the ball in their hands to be effective but aren’t particularly threatening from the perimeter. That often resulted in situations where somebody like Saraf or Wolf was in the corner as an alleged floor-spacer.
He was, however, less impressed by some other fan favorites around the eighth pick. His critiques of Khaman Maluach and Jeremiah Fears were particularly rough.
Not everyone was so negative. Michael Pina of The Ringer called Brooklyn’s off-season “shrewd.” For starters. he likes Egor Demin.
Egor Dëmin is my favorite player in this class. He’s a brilliant shot creator and his iffy 3-point stroke looked gorgeous throughout Las Vegas summer league.
He also had strong praise for the Cam Johnson – Michael Porter Jr. deal, even calling Porter Jr. “the more talented player.”
A couple of weeks later, they moved Cam Johnson to the Denver Nuggets for Michael Porter Jr.’s expensive contract and an unprotected 2032 first-rounder, which could be the most valuable incoming trade asset in the league. (Emphasis ours.) It’s all what a smart front office with cap space should do: Take unwanted salary off another team’s hands and then make them pay you a premium for it. In this case, Brooklyn also received a more talented player who’s nearly three years younger than the one they let go.
Pina likes where they stand on draft picks too, offering some news in the process: The Nets have more tradeable firsts than any other NBA club.
Even if the ping-pong balls don’t go the Nets’ way next year, they still have nine tradable future first-round picks—which is three more than any other team—including unprotected picks from the Knicks in 2027, 2029, and 2031 from the Mikal Bridges trade. That’s … phenomenal.
Yossi Gozlan of CapSheets.com and the Third Apron podcast took a different tack this week. No grades, although he does write, “They’ve used $36.1 million of their cap space so far with imbalance trades and extracted strong value with it,” (Emphasis ours.) He cites the acquisition of two unprotected first rounders, one used to take Drake Powell, the other a Denver Nuggets pick in 2032.
Overall, Gozlan looks at where the Nets next move could come, offering a variety of possibilities that speak to the Nets continuing flexibility. He even suggests a scenario where the Nets could still find $41 million. It would require Cam Thomas to accept a sign-and-trade without returning any salary, Sean Marks to exercise team options on three of the team’s four non-guaranteed players and use his $8.8 million Room MLE to sign either Day’Ron Sharpe or Ziaire Williams. That, of course is unlikely.
What’s more likely, per Gozlan, is another salary dump and he offers a range of possibilities starting with Anfernee Simons, the 26-year-old combo guard who was traded from Portland to Boston this summer in the deal that sent Jrue Holiday to the Blazers. Simons is on a $27.7 million expiring deal. He averaged 19.3 points on 43/36/90 shooting splits. Boston would like to move on from him.
[T]he Celtics are reportedly looking to reroute Anfernee Simons to save more money. They would get under the luxury tax line and eliminate their $70.75 million projected tax penalty by trading him into the Nets’ cap space. It would be more difficult to reduce $17.6 million, the amount they are above the tax line, during the season when the Nets have less cap space.
He also suggested smaller salary dumps that would bring Dallas’ Olivier-Maxence Prosper ($3.0 million), Philadelphia’s Andre Drummond ($5.0 million) or Orlando’s Jett Howard ($5.5 million) to Brooklyn. Howard is the son of Juwan Howard, Jordi Fernandez’s assistant.
On issue of the day, pundits are suggesting the Nets reported offer to Cam Thomas — two years and $28 million with the second year a team option — is fair for the 23-year old whose middle name apparently is “Polarizing.”
Grant Afseth of Fast Break Journal quotes a variety of anonymous league officials as saying while Thomas is a sure-fire scorer, his other deficiencies make a $25 or $30 million salary and a long-term contract unlikely.
“He’s a talented scorer, but he’s kind of stuck in the middle right now. He wants star money, but a lot of teams see him more like a microwave scorer off the bench,” a veteran scout for a team who made last year’s playoffs told FastbreakJournal.com. “That disparity is what’s keeping him on the market.”
As Brian Lewis reports Tuesday, don’t expect much to happen soon with CT. The Nets don’t face any deadline to get his deal done till October 1 the deadline for Thomas to exercise his qualifying offer and play next season for $5.99 million.
If he accepts, he’ll be an unrestricted free agent in 2026 and can veto any trade. Sequencing their deals means Thomas will have to wait. He might be their most important business, but he’s not the only deal — and may well be the last.
We made a couple of calls ourselves, not wanting to rely completely on the pundit class. One league source we consulted throughout the off-season — someone in a decision-making role — thinks the Nets reported offer to Thomas, something akin to the Room MLE of $14 million a year over two years is fair based on Thomas’s market. “I think that’s the right deal for the Nets.” He had earlier suggested that anything above $10 million a year would turn the off-season from “amazing to shitty.”
As for the criticism of taking Egor Demin at No. 8, he’s not buying it.
“Egor will be a stud,” he told ND. “Very, very good basketball player. People who don’t understand the game won’t get it. You’ll see development sooner than year’s end. But in 3-to-4 years, when you have actual players, you will really see.”
The source also likes Traore and Wolf among the picks. “Saraf has a chance,” he added and called Wolf “interesting.” He is not high on Powell at No. 22.
Of course, ALL of this is speculation, off-season chatter, opinions based at best on four games of Summer League in the case of the rookies. The roster isn’t a finished product and as Gozlan points out there are many varied options still available to Brooklyn. In other words, patience.