Brooklyn Nets: When the only tool you have is a hammer
The Step Back has been born from the aesthetics and traditions of the Hardwood Paroxysm Basketball Network. In the past, Hardwood Paroxysm has produced a massive stand-alone season preview. This year, that preview effort has been rolled up into the launch of The Step Back.
The Step Back’s writers and illustrators have prepared a hefty deep-dive into each team, built from multiple smaller sections. This year’s theme is television comedies and each section is named after some of our favorite sitcoms. For links to all 30 teams, as well as details about the focus of each section, check out our guide on how to read this preview.
Community
By Ian Levy (@HickoryHigh)
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What, then, does a problem look like to those without any tools?
Calling the Brooklyn Nets tool-less is a slight exaggeration. They have Sean Marks, a highly regarded general manager entering his first full season, who also happens to come from the heavily-fruited San Antonio Spurs organizational tree. The Nets have Kenny Atkinson, too, a highly regarded rookie head coach who last worked as an assistant in Atlanta to Mike Budenholzer (also of the San Antonio Spurs organizational tree).
What the Nets do not have are the type of basketball players typically associated with winning more games than you lose (all due respect to Jeremy Lin and Brook Lopez). They have some intriguing young players but none appear to have that celestial quality to be able to single-handedly change the fortunes of a franchise. The Boston Celtics hold the right to swap 2017 first round picks with the Nets and the own the rights to Brooklyn’s 2018 first round pick outright.
The toolbox is not empty, but it’s missing some of the basics.
So what do you do when you have neither the talent to be a playoff team nor access to the typical methods of acquiring that talent? You turn screws with a steak knife. You hammer in nails with a heavy rock. You trim your hedges with nail clippers, and you mow your lawn with kitchen shears. You go to work with what you have.
The Nets are in a unique rebuilding position. They have nothing to lose this season and, by virtue of their draft situation, they have very little to gain. If they are to solve the problem of winning basketball games, they will have to do it with Lin, Lopez, some assorted veterans, the athleticism of Isaiah Whitehead and Chris McCullough, the defense of Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, the shooting of Sean Kilpatrick, and, hopefully, the two healthy legs of Caris LeVert. Chances are they’ll fail, a lot, but they don’t really have a choice.
This season for the Nets is not about building towards anything specific, so much as it’s just about building anything. Habits, chemistry, maybe even discovering a solid future contributor in all that youth, a workable style, an identity — a quirk that can be sold to fans as a reason to partially fill an enormous arena. The Nets don’t have the luxury of being picky about defined goals, there aren’t enough tools for them to hold up their end of the goal-setting-and-meeting bargain. They have to work hard in service of the work itself, let the means justify the means, and hope that when the dust settles there is some sort of visible path to the future.
It’s really all there is.
Arrested Development
By Chris Manning (@cwmwrites)
By design and also because of how they’ve built their roster prior over the past few years, this Brooklyn Nets team is lacking real NBA players, or at least ones who are something right now. Jeremy Lin and Brook Lopez are both good players who could make an impact on good teams if in different situations, but on a team like Brooklyn, their efforts will likely be empty.
The hope for Brooklyn — especially with Kenny Atkinson, a coach who is best known for his ability to develop players like Lin and Kent Bazemore — is that what’s here now becomes something down the line as they get begin getting draft picks back in 2019 and working towards becoming a real NBA team again. For this year, that means that there’s a preset cap on how good Brooklyn can be.
Take Rondae Hollis-Jefferson for instance. Right now, he’s a flawed player who can’t shoot and who missed a large portion of last year due to injury. But there are already indications and hints that even if he never becomes a passable shooter, there are ways for him to impact the game otherwise. He can create chaos on defense in passing lanes, can at least somewhat protect the rim and can really defend whatever position he’s assigned to. He may cramp spacing on offense a fair amount, but he can still make Brooklyn better.
Or take Anthony Bennett, the former No. 1 pick who has failed to find a home and might need to make the Nets in order to stick in the NBA. Even if he has limits and is a bit of a tweener, he’s the type of player Brooklyn should take a chance on and at least give some minutes to for the time being. As bad as he’s been in the NBA, there’s a simple reason he went No. 1 and was projected as a lottery back coming out of college: he’s talented. He might be awful on defense this year and might have night where he struggles.
But that’s fine. Giving Bennett a chance to figure it all out has higher value than playing Luis Scola 25 minutes a night and, just maybe, Bennett can become something under Atkinson and with Lin feeding him the ball in the pick and roll. And if there’s one thing Bennett is good at right now, it’s rolling to the rim and dunking.
Take a look at the Nets’ roster even more and these scenarios pop up over and over. Caris LeVert has lottery talent, but a number of injury issues. Joe Harris might be able to shoot, but looked lost during much of his time in Cleveland. Chris McCullough showed flashes last year and has the ideal size to be a lanky, stretchy four, but the skill isn’t there yet.
In truth, there was probably no way around this for Brooklyn, as mortgaging your entire stock of assets to chase a short title window means the only way to build is by adding flawed, if talented, players. And that process has its limitations.
Perfect Strangers
by Matt D’Anna (@hoop_nerd)
Ten Word Analysis: There is plenty of room to grow here.
TeamSPACE charts are based on mapped clusters of shot activity. These areas are affectionately called Hunting Grounds, because they are the areas on the court where a player hunts for shots — and successfully scores most often. TeamSPACE takes the Hunting Grounds of all five players in a lineup and puts them on the court together — because, you know, they have to share that physical space, and there is only one ball.
In the past, it was one color per player; which meant that blending colors represented overlapping spaces for shot activity. But this time around, these are not your ordinary TeamSPACE shot maps. Each lineup is analyzed in the aggregate — one color! — and that unit is compared that unit to the rest of the league. So you will see a persistent red layer on every chart, highlighting the league’s Hunting Grounds from last season. The most prolific locations should come as no surprise: the paint, the corners, most of the top of the arc, and a couple of dabs at the foul line and top of the key.
So…how were these lineups chosen for each team? In the past, it’s been about projecting the starting lineup, estimating the most used lineup, or even designing the “most favoritest” lineup. This year? It’s the these charts represent the “most interestingly feasible” lineups….what? That’s a loaded phrase, so let’s unpack it a bit.
The goal is to identify the collection of five players on a team that could potentially play together, and if they did, the offensive results could be glorious. Ideally these lineups aren’t too far-fetched, but also slightly off-kilter and confusing to an opposing defense. While this type of analysis is not conducive for assessing defense, somewhat reasonable decisions are attempted to be made. So while it’s tempting to just put all the best shooters together…how realistic is it (outside of Houston, at least)? And, full disclosure: I favor some stretch in my lineups. It not only provides plenty of high-octane potential, but getting stretchy is also on par with current league-wide trends.
Each TeamSPACE chart has a couple of other sitcom-related features:
Family Matters: You’ll notice a series of Jaleel White’s across half court. Each lineup is scored on a scale of 0-7 Steve Urkels for how well it matches league-wide trends. Remember, there’s seven league Hunting Grounds (right corner three; at the rim; left corner three; foul line/top of the key; right wing; middle 3pt; left wing). A lineup gains points for matching each area; it loses points for messy excess shot activity.
Odd Couple: “Most interestingly feasible” is obviously debatable, so in order to account for some of those decisions, you’ll see Oscar and Felix on each chart. Often, there are players that are in the lineup…and maybe/probably they should not be. They get the Oscar label. And, there are those players that are out of the lineup…and maybe/probably should be included. They are the Felix for their team.
And briefly, a word about data. These strange visual displays are based on last season’s shot data, weighted by made buckets — so rookies and season-long injuries are sadly excluded. This analysis is nothing without the help of Darryl Blackport, and the research materials available atBasketball-Reference and NBA.com. Further, these charts feature some of the best logo re-designs I could curate from the ol’ Information Superhighway, including Dribbble.com and Pinterest. I made none of the logos; I merely selected some of my favorites. Enjoy!
Everyone Loves Raymond
By Matt Rutkowski (@MontaWorldPeace)
Linsanity. That was a word that happened. It happened to all of us. It was everywhere. In every headline. Around every corner. In every nightmare.
I won’t say that it scared me, but it did make me uncomfortable. I like Jeremy Lin, and I’m happy for people to have fun with words, but that’s not the kind of wordplay that I enjoy. It was constant and disquieting.
I had to find a way to cope with it, and I settled on immersion therapy. “Just put ‘Lin’ places,” I thought. Play “Link to the Past” a few times. Clean some Lint out of the dryer. Eat Linguine. Buy a basketball from IKEA and make a movie called Lingonberry Space Jam.
What a plan. It worked. It worked too well. Now I’m seeing “Lin” everywhere. But that shouldn’t be your problem. Like Linkin Park once said, “Lin the end, it doesn’t even matter.”
Jeremy Lin is the most likeable player on the Brooklyn Nets. He’s super great and neat.
That isn’t to say there isn’t competition. Brook Lopez is a potential Linfiltratator, but the wacky mascot shenaniLins are a little worn out. The problem with jokes is that they can get old Lincredibly quickly.
Bogdan Bogdanavić is a candidate as well. His performance in the OLinpics was massively Linpressive, but it’s still hard to get much of an Linpression of his personality.
Luis Scola should be Lincluded as he is largely regarded as a great locker room guy, but this isn’t a locker room. I don’t see any locks everywhere.
And speaking of locks, first overall draft pick Anthony Bennett is on the Nets as well. If I remember correctly, he was beloved in CleveLind. I could be wrong.
Still, Jeremy Lin has to get the nod. He has been a constant storyLine since his stint in New York, but he’s constantly reLinvented himself. He’s gone from borderLine NBA player to Linternational superstar, to potentially overpaid bench player, to Laker, to human Linterest story, to fringe player, to Linportant member of a playoff team on a quest to redeem his name and value. This has not been a Linear progression. Were you to graph out his career, he’d have more peaks and valleys than the AppalachLins.
And he has fantastic hair. Have you seen his hair lately? You should check again now. It might have changed. His head is a constant adventure.
But if that’s not the kind of adventure you like, Jeremy has his own Lincredible Hulk comic now. He has become a superhero. I mean, to me he always was one, but now I can just point to that. Checkmate.
This year, Lin’s story is going to change again. He’s back in the place where Linsanity was born as his team’s biggest free agent acquisition of the summer. It could go horribly wrong, or he could be the guy the biggest city in America can’t help but pull for all over again. Nets fans don’t have a lot to look forward to. It might as well be Jeremy Lin.
The great Andrew Linch once said “Everything can be quantified.” Some might say that likability is Linherently subjective, and subjective things are unquantifiable, but those people are weird and wrong. Jeremy Lin is the most likable player on BrookLin.
There once was a Lin who was awesome
He sat on the bench playing possum
He entered the game
Got some buckets and fame
And returned with his wallet in blossom