Post-NBA Free Agency power rankings
By John Buhler
With the bulk of the major NBA free agency signings out of the way, let’s take the time and power rank all 30 NBA teams on what they have in place going forward.
Everybody loves NBA free agency — except for when your star player skips town and joins a team in another conference (Sorry, Utah Jazz and Atlanta Hawks). It might hurt for fans of those teams but for the rest of the league, chaos is usually fun.
What we’re going to try to do here is power rank all 30 teams after the bulk of the major free agency signings are out of the way. Keep in mind that winning — or losing — free agency is not the same thing as winning an NBA championship. All 30 NBA teams will have 82 regular season games to get it right and see what happens on the hardwood, you know, the place where the games are played.
With so many guys switching and re-upping with their teams, let’s take a look out how the NBA shakes out in these post-free agency power rankings.
Brooklyn Nets
East, Atlantic
The Brooklyn Nets will be a bad basketball team once again in 2017-18. They lost their 7-foot spirit animal when they traded center Brook Lopez to the Los Angeles Lakers for former No. 2 overall pick D’Angelo Russell and Timofey Mozgov’s absolute albatross of a contract.
Losing Lopez breaks diehard Nets fans’ hearts, if the rampant losing already didn’t. However, he essentially lived on the Nets trading block since being drafted out of Stanford in 2008. That being said, it’s time for the Nets to the turn the page and hope Russell shows the promise he did in that one year with Ohio State.
Overall, Brooklyn has been quiet in NBA free agency, doing its usual thing of throwing max offer sheets at restricted free agents, only to lose them when the other team matches the Nets’ offer. It was wise for the Nets to put in the paper work on a guy like Washington Wizards small forward Otto Porter Jr., even though the Wizards made it abundantly that he’s coming back to the nation’s capital.
Frankly, calling another club’s bluff of matching an overpriced offer on a restricted free agent is the best way for the hopeless Nets to get out of the NBA’s darkest cellar. Admittedly, it’s not great in Brooklyn, but it could be worse, maybe? At least head coach Kenny Atkinson and general manager Sean Marks seem in lock step. Expect this to be the worst team in basketball again and the division rival Boston Celtics will get the No. 1 overall pick again in the 2018 NBA Draft.