Selling love in a hopeless place: The Nets prepare to pitch prospective GMs
Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov made a loud, showy, and mostly hollow move Sunday, firing head coach Lionel Hollins and reassigning general manager Billy King within the organization.
Hollins' ouster, at least, seemed to be a long time coming. It's not his fault the Nets dumped all their draft picks and mortgaged their future for what turned out to be one playoff series victory, but the fact that his team had no first-round pick (and thus no incentive to be bad) this season meant he had less rope than flailing contemporaries like Brett Brown and Byron Scott.
The Nets are bad, with no means of being anything but bad for the remainder of the season, and when nothing much can be done to make a bad situation better, the axe tends to fall on the coach.
Perhaps more surprising is that when it fell, it also lopped off general manager Billy King. That's not to say King didn't deserve to be fired - whatever the pressure from Prokhorov to build a contender immediately upon the franchise's relocation to Brooklyn, nearly all of King's moves failed spectacularly - but it leaves the Nets without a lead basketball decision-maker to take phone calls just six weeks before the trade deadline, a time that could prove crucial for the franchise moving forward.
Related: How Brooklyn got here - Billy King's worst moves as Nets GM
The Nets, in their current state, are not positioned to do any manner of rebuilding through the draft, and they need to be doing everything they can to change that equation, even a little bit (as they did by flipping Mason Plumlee for Rondae Hollis-Jefferson this past summer). When they ponied up for Brook Lopez and Thaddeus Young in the offseason, it was partly a play at short-term relevancy ahead of one of the most hotly anticipated free-agency summers in NBA history (a play that has obviously failed), but also a necessary move to maintain two assets, of which the Nets have precious few.
It's tough to gauge the trade market - if one exists - for Lopez and Young, but they are productive players who, in a vacuum, can be of use to plenty of teams around the league. Matching salaries will be tricky, but with so few out-and-out bad teams this season, the deadline figures to be a buyer's market. If nothing materializes, finding a home for those contracts will only get easier in the summer, when the cap explodes and several teams inevitably whiff on their top free-agent targets. The Nets could well fetch a first-rounder or an intriguing prospect or two for those signings when all's said and done.
With Joe Johnson's $25-million-a-year albatross coming off the books at season's end, the team should also be quite lean going forward; aside from Lopez and Young, the biggest hits on the ledger beyond this season are Jarrett Jack's non-guaranteed $6.3 million for 2016-17, and the approximately $5.5 million the Nets will be paying a stretched-out Deron Williams until 2020. That leaves open the possibility of sponging up bad contracts - like the Philadelphia 76ers occasionally have - in exchange for picks or prospect capital (though that will become more difficult under the new cap).
The Nets will eventually be able to operate like a normal NBA team again, maybe even sometime this decade. But first, they basically need to embrace being 76ers-level bad, without the promise of the 76ers' draft-asset stockpile for the foreseeable future. This is probably a five-year rebuild, at minimum, with at least three years before any tangible progress can even be glimpsed.
So Prokhorov now has to go find King's replacement, ideally sometime in the next six weeks, with that pitch in hand. What wouldn't you give to be a fly on the wall during those meetings? How will the Russian billionaire go about selling prospective GMs on the NBA's most hopeless situation?
Whoever accepts the job will not only knowingly take on the most difficult rebuilding task in recent NBA history, but also step into something fraught with melodrama and terrible optics.
To wit:
Head coach Jason Kidd left after one season following a failed coup, spurred by an apparent schism with management. Prokhorov spent the bulk of last season trying to find a buyer for the franchise. Paul Pierce famously tore the Nets organization to shreds after leaving Brooklyn for Washington. Johnson called this season the most difficult he's experienced in at least a decade. And, most recently, Williams said his Nets tenure made him question if he even wanted to play basketball.
Arguably the best case for taking up the GM challenge: Expectations couldn't be lower, and there's almost no possible way to do a worse job than King did. Besides sleep, and maybe a few years off one's life, what's there to lose?