Tank-Defying Nets Blossoming Into A Remarkable Early-Season Story

The Nets’ incomprehensible 128-120 victory at Golden State on Monday night is why sports fans, from the causal to the obsessively rabid, watch these games.

Brooklyn, on the second half of a back-to-back and injury depleted to the point where its 10 healthy bodies were whittled down to eight by the early exits of its best two players Cam Johnson and Cam Thomas, had no business taking the Western Conference-leading Warriors into crunch time after falling behind by 18 points midway through the third quarter, let alone pulling it out with a 23-16 finishing kick over the final 5:10.

The closing lineup included one legitimate, albeit low-level NBA starter in point guard Dennis Schroder, who was a veritable maestro in conducting the offense while leading the team with 31 points, and a bunch of guys on expiring or non-guaranteed contracts. The so-called misfit toys.

The Warriors postgame studio crew didn’t know what hit them. The host said, “Keon Johnson came off the bench—we had no idea who he was. We were like ‘Who is that guy?’ Gave them some great minutes off the bench, scoring 8 points, made all the hustle plays down the stretch.”

Watching disregarded young players like Johnson, Jalen Wilson and Ziaire Williams step up to hang with a team like the Warriors with a Championship pedigree was incredible. I’m sure you too all thought that NBA icon Stephen Curry would take over at some point to put Brooklyn to sleep. Only it didn’t happen, as the Nets responded each time Curry appeared to activate his killer mode with, if not daggers, a series of thousand-cut blows.

How could you not root for this team?

Oh wait, a large segment of Nets fans is going ballistic. The Nets are ruining the tank, they cry.

It’s true that the Nets (8-10), who traded four future first-round picks to Houston in the offseason so they could recoup their own picks in the 2025 and 2026 NBA Drafts that had been dealt to the Rockets in the 2021 James Harden blockbuster, could see their odds of a top-five pick in the lottery reduced by winning too many games like this. And for what purpose? Competing for a play-in slot where they’d surely be a quick exit?

Just a refresher for those who may not have heard that the NBA rejiggered the lottery system with an effective date of the 2019 Draft: The bottom three teams all have almost the exact same odds of picking in slots 1-through-4, with a mere 14% chance at the top pick. That’s one-in-seven, or worse than a dice roll. In the last five Drafts, the bottom feeder has yet to win a lottery, with Detroit tanking its way to a No. 5 overall pick in 2024. The Hawks, with a miniscule 3% chance of moving all the way up from No. 10, won it.

Where folks are getting antsy is over the probability that Brooklyn will fall out of the top five—as if the “expert” Draftniks always know where the top-tier cut line is. Look at the 2024 MVP voting by original Draft slot:

No 1 overall 1 (Anthony Edwards)

No. 3 overall 2 (Jayson Tatum, Luka Doncic)

No. 11 overall 2 (Domantas Sabonis, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander)

No. 15 overall 1 (Giannis Antetokounmpo)

Second round (2) (Nikola Jokic, Jalen Brunson)

Only three of the top eight vote-getters were taken with top five picks, with the winner Jokic going No. 41 overall.

I understand the benefit of better odds, but don’t discount the whiff rates of the person doing the picking either. Remember “The Process?” The Sixers blatantly tanked for four consecutive seasons last decade when the lottery odds favored the strategy. It yielded one MVP (Joel Embiid), two busts (Jahlil Okafor, Markelle Fultz), and whatever you want to call current Net Ben Simmons. Eastern Conference Finals subsequently reached: 0. Or the same as Brooklyn.

Nets General Manager Sean Marks’ Draft record may not be perfect, but he has generally had a good feel for value despite never having a selection above No. 20 (Caris LeVert, 2016). Are we going to go crazy if the Nets end up at No. 6 or 7 in what is supposed to be a deeply talented Draft class? Even if there were a sure-thing, transformational player like LeBron James or Victor Wembanyama at the top (sorry, Duke’s Cooper Flagg, as good as he already is at 17, ain’t that), you’re still stuck at 14% whether you go 0-82 or something like 24-58.

The NBA season isn’t even 20 games old but the Nets, under rookie Head Coach Jordi Fernandez, are blossoming into a remarkable story. It certainly could evolve into a short-lived one on its own, but Fernandez’s admittedly tough training camp has paid some early dividends, since 11 of Brooklyn’s 18 games have been decided in the final five minutes, per NBA.com. The Nets are 6-5 in those contests, with three of those defeats coming at the hands of Denver and the brutal back-to-back at East leaders Boston and Cleveland.

Who cares if this is sustainable? No one expected the Nets to be any fun at any point this season—Las Vegas put their preseason over/under win total at 19.5—and many of their own fans want management to step in to put a lid on the winning by trading away veterans like Schroder, Cam Johnson, and Dorian Finney-Smith. Yet this team has so far defied everyone by playing harder and executing better than many of their more talented opponents, so who knows, maybe that too won’t stop them from stealing an extra victory here and there.

With Ryan Ruocco on the call for the YES Network, the Warriors game brought back memories of the March 2019 Nets miracle in Sacramento. NetsDaily pointed out that the 25-point fourth quarter comeback generated a 0.0 late-night TV rating. I was among the select few who stayed up through the end and, as I was listening to Ruocco doing Brooklyn’s 108-103 victory in Sacramento on Sunday, it made me think, all these years later, “Anything is possible.”

It’s why I became a sports fan in the first place.