Should The Nets Shut Down Porter?

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Over the first half of the season, Michael Porter Jr. had been a rare bright spot in an unbearably dreary Nets campaign. After seven seasons of fulfilling a complementary role in Denver, he grabbed Brooklyn’s alpha dog opportunity with gusto—at the end of January, he ranked 17^th in the league in scoring at 25.6 points per game on a 48.2/39.8/85.1 shooting split with an approximately 40% increase over his career usage rate.

We can only speculate as to the reasons behind Porter’s declining production once the calendar turned to February. Following Sunday’s 115-104 defeat in Atlanta, he’s averaging 17.8 ppg on 38% shooting from the floor, including a horrid 16.3% from three-point territories, over his six games this month.

Perhaps his penchant for knocking down difficult shots was bound to regress. Or maybe the disappointment over a) Not getting an All-Star spot, and/or b) Not getting traded at the February 6 deadline affected him mentally.

More likely, Porter has been trying to play through pain, because as lousy as the Nets (15-41) have been, they are much worse without him, even when he is hoisting bricks. Only backup center Day’Ron Sharpe owns a better net rating among Nets players who have suited up for at least 10 games this season, with the team’s offensive efficiency going into the tank to the tune of about 11.5 points per 100 possessions when Porter isn’t on the court, according to NBA.com. That’s a testament to the gravity opponents must respect from Porter’s mere presence.

Porter suffered an MCL sprain during a January 7 game versus Orlando and sat out a few games before the All-Star break with tendonitis in that knee, though reports noted that the two injuries were unrelated. Porter’s misfires during this period, including the 7-of-8 three-point attempts in Atlanta, haven’t just been of the in-and-out variety; they’ve often been wildly off, an indication that what’s gone awry could very well be due to something physical in nature.

Considering the Nets are already 11 games out of play-in contention, the prudent course of action would be to shut Porter down, as many other teams in tanking mode have been doing when their best players suffer injuries.

However, The Athletic reported that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had some harsh words for the league’s General Managers during Thursday’s video call on the subject of player availability. Brooklyn GM Sean Marks was allegedly a prime target of Silver’s spews.

I gather that Silver didn’t appreciate being on the front line taking fire during last week’s press conference in advance of the All-Star Game when the media confronted him over the league’s tanking plague. The last thing he wants to address at such a high-profile event is challenges to NBA games’ integrity.

The Nets, in my opinion, have been tanking organically—their five first-round rookies have each averaged over 18 minutes per game this month (Ben Saraf was sent down to G League Long Island for three of the last 11 games) and the rest of the team isn’t competitive on paper. This isn’t the Utah situation where they pull their good guys to insure losses. It pains Head Coach Jordi Fernandez to cough up games like Sunday’s when the Hawks erased an 11-point deficit with a 24-2 closing kick.

As for Marks, I wouldn’t even categorize the waiving of Cam Thomas, Brooklyn’s second leading scorer, after failing to find a trade partner as a tank move. If Silver is looking for evil intentions, he should instead be admonishing Nets Governor Joseph Tsai, who previewed the plan in an October podcast when he said, “We have one (first-round) pick in 2026, and we hope to get a good pick. So, you can predict what kind of strategy we will use for this season. But we have a very young team.”

That first round pick was reacquired from Houston two summers ago as part of a deal that also got Brooklyn back its 2025 pick (used on Egor Demin) in exchange for three future first rounders and a 2025 first round swap (Houston flipped Khaman Maluach to Phoenix in the Kevin Durant blockbuster while the Nets selected Danny Wolf). The idea was that the 2025 and 2026 Draft classes were worthy of the bet, after which the Nets would pivot to a more typical rebuild utilizing their salary cap space.

While I am still not that enamored with Marks’ 2025 Draft class, there is some hope that June will bear sweeter fruit. Tanking won’t guarantee a top three pick, but it will limit how far the Nets’ slot can drop.

Of course, that applies to the approximately 30% of the league (not counting New Orleans, who traded away its 2026 first-round pick) who stand to benefit from winning the race to the bottom. Until Silver flattens out the lottery odds, which won’t happen for a bit, teams will be tempted to throw games.

As such, there will be howls that the Nets and Porter, despite no evidence to back up their assertion, are feigning the injury should they opt to shut him down for an extended period.

Let them howl. Having Porter play through this could potentially hurt his potential trade value for this coming offseason. And the Nets haven’t been winning with him anyway.