Hardwood Paroxysm presents: 2015 NBA playoffs – Did that really just happen?

The Nets Likely Earning Billy King a Contract Extension

By Derek James (@DerekJamesNBA) — Hardwood Paroxysm

OK, so the ink isn’t dry, but it sounds that Nets general manager Billy King will get a contract extension. Evidently the team’s late-season push saved King’s job. Now if you’re keeping score at home, we’ve had to 1) watch the Nets past the regular season; and 2) stomach the thought of King continue to keep the Nets in the dregs of the East for the next couple of seasons.

Let’s make this clear: I’m not hating on the Nets. I’m hating on the Nets continuing to suck and want to see them do well because good basketball teams are fun. These Nets are not fun.

We didn’t think we’d be looking at King’s Brooklyn tenure like this at first. One of King’s first moves was trading for Deron Williams. Now, this was considered a good thing back in 2011 despite the swap costing the Nets Derrick Favors, Devin Harris and two picks that amounted to Enes Kanter and Gorgui Dieng.

The picks were supposed to be inconsequential since the Nets were going to go full-steam into Brooklyn with a competitive team. With this in mind, King flipped Shawne Williams and Mehmet Okur and a 2012 first round pick (Damian Lillard) for Gerald Wallace. The blockbuster deals for Joe Johnson, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Jason Terry would follow a few months later.

Now the Nets were really ready to contend, and on-paper, this team still looks great. The Nets won 49 games in the first year with their seasoned power roster, and 44 the next. That’s hardly what was expected out of this team and it became clear this experiment was failing.

King sacrificed Damian Lillard for a few months of Wallace’s disintegrating corpse and was a throw-in with the Celtics for Garnett and Pierce. Pierce would leave after the 2014 season for the Wizards and Garnett was traded to Minnesota this past February for Thaddeus Young.

At least Johnson and Williams are still there. The coulda-woulda-shoulda game is always easy to play in hindsight, but these were two other gambles that backfired. Williams hasn’t aged gracefully and still carries an enormous cap figure. Favors, Dieng and Kanter have all become effective players in the NBA while Brooklyn’s roster is void of young talent.

Brooklyn is still paying on Johnson as well. Atlanta has the right to swap picks with Brooklyn this summer and still owes a 2017 second rounder beyond that. Those debts wouldn’t be so consequential if the Nets were a contender and the Celtics weren’t able to swap their picks as well as owing their 2017 first round pick to Danny Ainge as well.

With an aging cap-strapped roster, the Nets stumbled to make the playoffs in the East as the competition in front of them slumped down the stretch. The Nets were that team that won 38 games, still made the playoffs, and made the basketball viewing public loathe the conference playoff seeding. Their reward? A 4-2 defeat at the hands of the Hawks, who own the rights to Brooklyn’s future.

As much as I love the poetic justice of the Hawks ousting the Nets, there needs to be a change in Brooklyn. Joe Johnson made some comments after the series saying that he thought this might be the last time we see this group — and he may  be right — but it hardly helps to retain the guy who put them on this carousel of mediocrity.

It sounds as if King’s job is somehow safe and has earned himself some job security. Yes, despite going through four coaches, having nearly every move he made backfire and having one of the highest payrolls in the league, it sounds like King will still have a job. Amazingly, the team record versus the team payroll and the fact that so many of his moves setup other teams more for success than his own don’t matter. If anyone else had their decisions turn out this badly in an average Joe’s job, they’d have been let go long ago.

Going forward, King says he wants to build around Brook Lopez and Thaddeus Young with everyone else being up for grabs. That’s fine and all, but Lopez could be a foot injury away from having his career cut short, and Young is simply a fine player. At best, the Nets are three superstars away from being competitive, which is right where they were when King traded for Deron Williams. With no picks and no real assets (Teams aren’t giving up high picks or promising young talent for Johnson and Williams), it’s hard to see how he accomplishes it.

Sadly, it seems that if we want to see the Nets succeed — or at least be more than a first round formality — we’re going to have to wait a long time. What King has shown that he’s the man to do this is beyond my pay grade, but evidently it’s something. Perhaps it makes sense to Nets ownership if you take the fact that they made the playoffs at face value. But if you look a little deeper, the future is far less bright and that’s because of King.

Here’s to another four years of Billy King building a bridge to nowhere!

Next: Blake Griffin, all he does is…everything