The Whiteboard: Let’s all calm down about the Brooklyn Nets

The Brooklyn Nets are a smart team, but they’re also pretty damn far from being a threat to the Eastern Conference.

It’s fun to feel good about the Brooklyn Nets. The now-infamous trade with the Boston Celtics that brought Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to Brooklyn and saw three first round picks plus a pick swap go to the Boston Celtics completely ravaged the Nets.

With a new front office headed by general manager Sean Marks, Brooklyn has done several quietly smart things recently. The Nets have one move, and it’s been a go-to for them recently–take on other teams’ bad contracts in exchange for draft picks and young players.

Using this method, and starting with basically no assets, the Nets have accumulated players like D’Angelo Russell, Allen Crabbe, Jarrett Allen, and Caris LeVert, either by trading for them outright or trading for a pick used on the player. That’s good! All of those players have the potential to be pretty good pros.

That being said, there’s been a lot of excitement about the Nets recently. Brooklyn will have a lot of cap space next summer, meaning it is theoretically possible for the Nets to grab one or even two star players on max deals to add to their young core.

The problem for Brooklyn is that a lot of teams will have that sort of cap space, and many of them will have much better rosters than the Nets do. Marks has done well with the hand he was dealt, there’s no doubt about that, but this roster still lacks the top end talent needed for an NBA team to be truly successful.

The Nets won 28 games last season. Their major summer acquisitions were Shabazz Napier, Ed Davis, Kenneth Faried, and rookies Dzanan Musa and Rodions Kurucs. Napier and Davis are nice bench players, but again, no player in Brooklyn is anything close to a star. The NBA is a league driven by the top players, and something like 10 Eastern Conference teams have a player far and away better than anybody on the Nets.

Getting that star is the most important thing in the Association, and it’s also one of the hardest, especially now that stars seem to prefer playing together. The Nets are in a better place, but they’re still not in a good place.

Next: The legacy of Seattle basketball is alive and well in the BIG3

#Content you can’t miss

Bye Bye ‘Bari; Adam McGee and Jordan Treske say goodbye to Jabari Parker on the latest episode of their podcast, Win In 6

Vive la France; Slam compiles some of the best NBA player tweets about the World Cup

Congrats on the Sexton; Andre Snellings assesses Collin Sexton’s Summer League performance

Some Big Bulls; Rucker Haringey wonders if the Bulls already have their frontcourt of the future

Learning from the summer; The Ringer Staff share their biggest takeaways from free agency