How the hiatus affects all 30 NBA teams

Brooklyn Nets: Already looking ahead to next season

Even before the hiatus, this season had become something of a wash for the Brooklyn Nets. It went from an evaluation year with Kevin Durant out, to a glass-half-empty campaign with Kyrie Irving joining him on the IR, to a waste with head coach Kenny Atkinson stepping down and the Nets facing a summer of large-scale change and a new head coaching hire.

Next season’s Nets could look radically different, and although everything we’ve seen from Spencer Dinwiddie and a healthy Caris LeVert is encouraging, switching from Jarrett Allen to DeAndre Jordan at starting center is the kind of uncomfortable politics we haven’t dabbled in since Game of Thrones‘ prime.

In any case, even with the season delayed a few months, Durant wasn’t planning on returning. There’d be little point, especially with Brooklyn’s season likely to amount to a brief first-round playoff exit. Now that KD and three other unnamed Nets testing positive for novel coronavirus, a longer delay actually gives him and Irving more time to heal and prepare for the 2020-21 campaign … whenever it may begin.