Report: NBA considering banning certain pick swaps to avoid Nets-like disaster

The Brooklyn Nets may be moving in the right direction, but they're still a long way from even catching a glimpse of the light at the end of their interminable self-made tunnel.

The Nets crippled themselves in the summer of 2013, when they sent unprotected 2014, 2016, and 2018 first-round picks to the Boston Celtics in an ill-fated trade for the husks of Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce.

But Nets chairman Dmitry Razumov doesn't regret sending out those picks without protections as much as he regrets adding in a 2017 first-round pick swap as a needless sweetener. The result of that swap came to bear this summer, when the Nets watched helplessly as they won the draft lottery on the Celtics' behalf.

"We miscalculated in the heat of the moment," Razumov told ESPN's Zach Lowe.

He and the rest of that 2013 front office may be the last to miscalculate in such fashion. So damaging has that trade been to the Nets' present and future, the NBA is reportedly considering a measure that would protect teams from making a similar mistake.

The league has discussed outlawing pick swaps for years between those in which a team already owes its first-rounder to other teams, sources told Lowe. The proposed rule is on the competition committee agenda, but hasn't yet been seriously debated, Lowe reports.

Teams are already forbidden from outright trading their own first-round picks in successive years thanks to the Stepien Rule, a similar protect-teams-from-themselves stipulation, named for reckless former Cleveland Cavaliers owner Ted Stepien and instituted back in 1983.

What will they call the new edict if it ever becomes law? The Prokhorov Provision? The King Clause? The Nets No-No? The possibilities are endless, really.