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Barring a trade, when Adam Silver steps to the podium at Barclays Center in three weeks, he will not announce a draft pick for the Brooklyn Nets.
Wednesday marked the deadline for the first of many big decisions the Nets will face this offseason: whether or not to push the 2022 first-round pick acquired from Philadelphia in February’s Ben Simmons/James Harden trade to 2023. The Nets had to let the Sixers know by midnight, and they officially punted the pick, 23rd in this month’s draft, to next year. The Nets now have no picks in the 2022 draft.
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Since their season ended in a first-round sweep by the Celtics, who went on to win the Eastern Conference, Brooklyn has worked out dozens of draft prospects. When general manager Sean Marks addressed the media in his postseason press conference on May 11, he indicated the team was looking for players who could fill immediate needs rather than development projects. “We’re going through as if we’re trying to find somebody for this roster, for this team that can help us move forward with,” he said. “So obviously if we find a group that we think is going to be there, then we keep the pick.”
Evidently, the Nets did not see enough players they liked who might reasonably be available at No. 23. Had they kept the pick, it would have marked the highest draft selection they have retained since they took Jarrett Allen 22nd in 2017. Technically, the Nets drafted Saddiq Bey 19th overall in 2020 and Nickeil Alexander-Walker 17th a year earlier, but they traded both on their respective draft nights.
In 2023, the Nets will have two first-round picks, the Sixers’ and their own, which Houston has the right to swap with them. The 2023 draft is expected to be deeper than this year’s.
Heading into the week, the expectation was the Nets would push back the selection, giving them more time to potentially package it in a trade — and the hope that Philadelphia’s position might be higher in the draft order next summer. Philadelphia traded for Harden in an attempt to capitalize on Joel Embiid’s MVP-caliber season and make a deep playoff run. The result was a second-round playoff exit, the same fate Harden faced with the Nets last season. Harden failed to show the scoring prowess and burst he regularly displayed in Houston and Brooklyn before he suffered multiple hamstring strains last season — and Harden’s bout with Father Time coupled with Embiid’s injury history presents the potential for the Sixers’ pick to rise higher than 23rd in 2023, giving the Nets either a strong trade chip or better draft capital.
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Brooklyn could still trade the pick this calendar year, and there’s a chance it could do so as soon as this month. Historically, Marks makes a trade on draft day almost annually. He dealt Landry Shamet shortly before the start of the 2021 draft for Jevon Carter and the 29th pick. (Brooklyn drafted Day’Ron Sharpe.) On the eve of the 2020 draft, he acquired Bruce Brown and Shamet in a three-team trade that sent Bey to Detroit. In 2019, he sent Alexander-Walker and Allen Crabbe to Atlanta for Taurean Prince, creating the second max contract slot that allowed Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving to both come to Brooklyn.
The Nets have six trade exceptions they could include in a deal with the pick to take on a player with a higher salary — two of which expire on July 6. One is worth less than $120,000, making it too small to use, but the $11.3 million exception created in the Simmons/Harden trade by adding Seth Curry to the dealhas the potential to help add a significant piece to the roster. The $6.3 million exception created in the DeAndre Jordan salary dump does, too. That one expires in August.
Aside from possible trades and non-roster personnel, the Nets’ next deadline is at the end of June, when they’ll have to decide on Kessler Edwards’ team option. Around that time, they’ll learn whether Irving and Patty Mills will opt into their player options, which could put the Nets’ free agent number as high as 10, including Edwards and two-way player David Duke Jr. Though Marks won’t have to worry about a standard rookie contract this offseason, plenty of decisions remain on his plate.
(Photo: Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)
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