Marks Has A Sharpe Eye For Nets’ Big Man Prospects
The Nets under General Manager Sean Marks have a pretty good record with their own pending free agents over the years. Those that Marks hasn’t extended were traded for varying degrees of compensation. The only players I can recall who walked out the Brooklyn door for nothing in return in the last few years were veteran minimum guys like Yuta Watanabe.
Marks also has an even more impressive track record to point to--overseeing a successful development program for NBA big men. It started with the relatively low (No. 22 overall) first-round selection of Jarett Allen in the 2017 Draft. Though I would describe Allen’s three-plus seasons in Brooklyn as up-and-down, everyone knew his defensive presence and athleticism alone were apparent such that he was going to get paid in the summer of 2021 as a free agent.
On a team that was already over the luxury tax threshold, the prudent move was to include Allen in the James Harden deal that February. Allen was rerouted to Cleveland, which signed him to a new 5-year, $100 million contract. Just like most experts expected.
Maybe Marks really didn’t want to surrender his homegrown prospect in his heart, but by then he had another card up his sleeve—6-foot 11 center Nic Claxton, whom I would argue is even more athletic than Allen, was in his second season following his selection as the first pick in the second round of the 2019 Draft.
Though plagued by injuries during his first three pro seasons, Claxton showed enough potential that Marks extended him for another two years for a reasonable $17.3 million at the 2022 free agent market open. Given Claxton’s subsequent ascension as one of the league’s top defensive centers, I’d call that a great deal for Brooklyn.
However, that too will come to an end this summer, when it will be Claxton’s turn to get paid in free agency. Again, some, like HoopHype’s Michael Scotto, are predicting his new deal could reach a $100 million total value.
Ordinarily, Marks wouldn’t let another team come withing sniffing distance of Claxton before he had his signature on an extension, but these aren’t ordinary times in Brooklyn. So much of their post-superstar era rebuild is in flux that Marks might just go into the summer with Plans A, B, C, D, E…all the way to Q, on his tablet.
For instance, unless some unforeseen opportunity to make a move that will vault them back into contention falls into their lap, the Nets want to avoid being labeled luxury tax repeaters this season, and maybe also in 2024-25. As long as the perpetually injured Ben Simmons’ horrible contract (he’ll count over $40 million on next season’s salary cap) is on the books, it will force the Nets to make difficult decisions when it comes to their six other pending unrestricted free agents besides just Claxton.
Here’s another variable in this equation: How much do the Nets believe in Day’Ron Sharpe, their backup center who they drafted with their second first-round pick (No. 29 overall) in the 2021 Draft?
When Sharpe first arrived on the scene, I saw him as a tad more skilled version of Reggie Perry—undersized to the point where he couldn’t provide adequate rim protection and his own shot was routinely getting blocked. In other words, unimpressive.
Boy was I way off. After a few seasons of development where he must have lived at the gym, the attributes—his non-stop motor when it comes to rebounding on both ends and basketball IQ—have come to the forefront.
Sharpe’s minutes per game have creeped up every month this season, which is what Nets Head Coach Jacque Vaughn said will continue to happen after Tuesday night’s escape in Detroit if Sharpe focused on excelling in those simple areas. Sharpe was a ball magnet in the fourth quarter, earning an extended seven-minute run into crunch time as the Nets struggled to avoid the embarrassment of breaking the Pistons’ NBA-record 27-game losing streak,
It wasn’t that Claxton was off that night—he made several spectacular plays, including a second-quarter sequence where he blocked a Pistons shot to himself, initiated a fast break, and then finished it with an alley-oop dunk. If anything, I felt Claxton was mostly held back by playing almost half of his minutes with the undersized starting lineup Vaughn had around him, which often left him alone in the paint to deal with the bigger and energized Pistons. Claxton’s conditioning and free throw shooting need improvement, but he’s been the least of Brooklyn’s problems this season.
In any case, that hasn’t changed the fact that Sharpe has been holding his own when called upon. The Nets (15-16) even split the 10 games Claxton missed with injuries and injury management, which includes the controversial 144-122 shellacking by the star-laden Bucks in Wednesday’s back-to-back where Brooklyn rode with a G-League infested lineup in front of their home crowd at Barclays Center.
To be fair, Vaughn went ultra small in many of those earlier contests, with heavy doses of wings Dorian Finney-Smith and Royce O’Neale at the 5. And offensively, Sharpe is still quite limited. His third-quarter corner three-pointer on Wednesday night was his first make of the season in seven long-range attempts and he’s been blocked on 12% of his field goal attempts, per NBA.com.
But then there are all the winning plays he has delivered, be it creating extra possessions on the offensive glass, where he only trails New York’s Mitchell Robinson for the league lead in offensive rebounding percentage among players who average at least 15 minutes per game, or by providing a strong interior defensive presence in drop pick-and-roll coverage (his 106.2 defensive rating ranks 13th among the same 272-player group).
Sharpe has found a bit of a home playing in Brooklyn’s current bench unit with Finney-Smith, O’Neale, Cam Thomas, and Dennis Smith Jr. The positive 19-minute sample size is too small to promote, but there is undeniable chemistry between Smith and Sharpe on pick-and-rolls.
All of the above helps explain why the Nets are 8-2 in the Sharpe’s ten largest minute total games this season, where he has averaged 10 boards per game with four double-doubles.
It might be tougher for the Nets to transition, should they eventually opt for that route, from Claxton to Sharpe than it was from the more apple-to-apples move away from Allen. Claxton is clearly the superior player with the somewhat unique ability to guard on the perimeter as well as he does in the paint. Sharpe uses his seven-foot wingspan to maximum effect, but no one would put him in the same class as Claxton when it comes to rim protection.
The big question, though, is whether Claxton is $20 million-plus per year better. And if not, does that mean the Nets should look to trade him sometime in the next six weeks before the NBA deadline?
No matter what happens, the Nets might find themselves in the same position next year, when Sharpe’s contract will be up that summer. By then, we’ll hopefully learn more about what the newest big man, Noah Clowney, the 19-year old No. 21 overall pick from the 2023 Draft who scored his first 14 points in his second NBA game on Wednesday night, can bring to the court.
I wasn’t a fan of taking Clowney, who is shorter and even leaner than Claxton, at the time, but with the way this organization develops centers, they deserve some benefit of the doubt.