How East’s Emerging Great Race Affects Nets

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The East is no longer Least.

LeBron James deciding on Friday to join a Sixers squad alongside the likes of Joel Embiid, Jaylen Brown, Tyrese Maxey, and VJ Edgecombe in a Conference that will boast Jayson Tatum in Boston, Cade Cunningham in Detroit, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo in Miami, Kawhi Leonard (pending investigation) and Scottie Barnes in Toronto, and the return of Tyrese Halliburton in Indiana—not to mention the reprise of the Jalen Brunson-led defending Champion Knicks—should finally even the scale, if not tip it in the opposite direction, against the long-dominant West.

Good luck—and, perhaps more importantly, good health—will likely determine the ultimate victor in the coming Great Race.

The Nets, unfortunately, will continue to hold different ambitions. The talent disparity when measured against the above clubs looks to be so vast, fans will have to squint hard at small moments to find signs of hope. A Mikel Brown Jr. heat check here, an Egor Demin rim attack there. The team will at least try this season, but the roster is so young and defensively deficient that wins will remain hard to come by. Oddsmakers have set Brooklyn with the Conference’s lowest over/under at 22.5, just 2.5 wins above last season’s egregious tank.

Outright tanking for a third consecutive season, of course, won’t be an option, as the rights to Brooklyn’s 2027 first-round pick is subject to a swap with Houston, the last remnant of the 2021 James Harden blockbuster. That was the last time the organization put all their chips in the middle to compete for a title. Too bad that it might be a few more years before ownership is prepared to buy back in given the ages and contract terms of all those star-studded lineups the overmatched Nets will be chasing.

Which means the Nets should be in no hurry to extend Michael Porter Jr., the team’s leading scorer last season before he was shut down for good on March 10 with a (cough, cough) strained hamstring. Porter’s 5-year, nearly $180 million deal he signed while with Denver expires after the 2026-27 season.

Not that Nets General Manager Sean Marks is showing any anxiety over Porter’s status—he has all season to get him to ink a new deal, and his remarks at the Las Vegas Summer League confirmed as much. Which might be why Porter’s agent, Mark Bartelstein, seems to be the one doing the clamoring. Bartelstein recently spoke of how much his client has thrived in Brooklyn and his wishes for it to continue.

It’s true that Porter had a fantastic first half of last season. I thought he was robbed of an All-Star berth—if Brooklyn’s woeful record was indeed a factor, how did Pascal Siakam, with worse numbers on a worse Indiana squad, make it over him?

However, it’s not like Porter contributed to winning. The Nets were 14-38 in the games he suited up. That .269 winning percentage exceeded the 20% win rate without him, but one might have expected a greater difference considering all the Washington Generals-type lineups the Nets concocted over the season’s final month.

Not that the losing was Porter’s fault. He registered a 47.4/38.5/85.3 shooting split with 7.2 rebounds and 3.2 assists per game (both season-ending marks were career highs) through the All-Star break. Through deft cutting and otherworldly shotmaking, he found ways to score against defenses who were able to focus solely on stopping him. On the other hand, he was considered one of the league’s worst defenders, on-ball and off-ball, and the fact that he acknowledged a letdown in performance after the All-Star disappointment wasn’t a great look.

Porter would have looked better, in my opinion, had he been traded to a team like Detroit at the deadline. As a complementary third or fourth offensive option, he won a ring in Denver. Think the Pistons could have used his gravity while they were losing four-of-five to blow their second-round series against Cleveland? They might rue that missed opportunity.

Porter, though, allegedly wants to be paid like the alpha he was last season. Maybe not quite the max extension peak of four years and $234 million, but likely somewhere north of the $45 million AAV neighborhood. Since the Nets as of this writing have held off using their full allotted cap space of about $11 million (center Moritz Wagner’s approximately $9.3 million free agent signing that fits into a midlevel exception remains pending), they can frontload some of the extension and then set up the remaining years on a declining scale—i.e. $49.5 million for this season, $47 million in 2027-28, and so on.

Is that in Brooklyn’s best long-term interest, though? I saw posts showing how the Nets are projected to sport the NBA’s most cap space after the 2026-27 season at around $70 million. Yeah, but that assumes they let Porter walk for nothing next summer. Porter’s cap hold, if he intends to re-sign, is over $42.6 million, per Spotrac.com.

The underlying problem, however, is that Porter, even though just 28 and more than three years removed from the most recent of his once chronic back issues, doesn’t fit in Brooklyn’s timeline. The Nets aren’t in a serious position to suddenly pivot with go-for-broke moves whereby Porter would slot into his most effective lesser role. Not this season or next offseason.

For those fans yearning for a 2018-19 reboot, the East back then was far weaker from top-to-near-bottom. The Nets were able to ride a rather misfit toys rotation to a 42-40 record. This incoming group is not only flawed, it pales in comparison to even the middling competitors in the East. The Wizards might still suck, but it would take a catastrophic deluge of injuries for them to finish below Brooklyn again.

And what comes after? We never know in this volatile league which superstar suddenly becomes available (Anthony Edwards is my wild guess to ask out of Minnesota), but it’s not like Brooklyn will have the cap space it did in the Summer of 2019 necessary for a second Clean Sweep.

Apples and oranges.

The reality always was that Porter has been way more valuable to the Nets than he is in the eyes of other clubs. Whether or not Marks actually put Porter on the market in February, the lack of an executed trade proved that no one came running to blow Brooklyn away with an offer, even when he was lighting up scoreboards.

That view should guide how the Nets proceed. If Porter is willing to accept less term, such as a two-year deal, perhaps with a player option, then I see nothing wrong with the team extending him early. Barring that, this is a case where I’d agree with Marks’ credo that patience is a virtue. With the East set to engage in a proverbial battle well above the Nets’ plane, maybe a team under duress due to injuries or one that sees Porter as a key missing piece for a late season and beyond run will call on Marks for a rental.

All the more reason to let this Porter situation play out for the remainder of the offseason. To paraphrase what old Pirates GM Branch Rickey, a Brooklyn legend, once said to Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner, the Nets can finish last with Porter, and they can finish last without him.