Brooklyn Nets Hope For The Last Laugh

The First Round of the 2025 NBA Draft was held on June 25th at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. For fans of the local Brooklyn Nets, despite their team having an unprecedented five first-round picks, the event had a bittersweet taste. Their hopes of landing a top-three pick were dashed during the May 12th NBA Draft Lottery where the Nets, despite finishing the 2024-25 campaign with the league’s sixth-worst record, ended up with the eighth selection as the best of their five first-rounders. At the conclusion of the first round, the Nets found their five selections, as individuals and as a group, as the subjects of ridicule by basketball draft aficionados, opposing front office types, and even their own fans. But while it will take several years before a true assessment of their 2025 draft day performance can be made, the Brooklyn Nets hope for the last laugh as they possess 32 future draft picks, including 13 in the first round.

WELL, WHO DID THE BROOKLYN NETS SELECT? WHAT’S SO FUNNY?

As a result of some prior wheeling and dealing, the much-maligned Brooklyn Nets General Manager Sean Marks, who has held that position for nearly ten years, had secured selections 8, 19, 22, 26, and 27 for the 2025 NBA Draft. While many basketball pundits assumed the Nets would not draft five rookies, the Nets did exactly that. But after their season-long hopes of selecting one of the top players in the draft (in their own building) didn’t materialize, the Nets and their fans watched in horror as players like Cooper Flagg, Dylan Harper, VJ Edgecombe, Kon Kneuppel, and Ace Bailey heard their names called and paraded across their stage wearing the caps of other franchises. Here’s who the Nets selected when their turns finally came up:

• With the 8th selection, the Nets added 19-year-old Egor Demin, a 6’9″ player originally from Russia. Demin played one year of college ball at Brigham Young University. Listed as a point guard, Demin appears best suited as a small forward who can move the ball and shoot.
• With the 19th selection, the Nets added 19-year-old Nolan Traore, a 6’3″ point guard from France. Last season, Traore played professionally at Saint-Quentin in his home country. Best known for his speed, passing, and ability to get to the basket, Traore will need to develop a consistent jumper.
• With the 22nd selection, the Nets added 19-year-old Drake Powell, a 6’5″ shooting guard one played one year of college ball at the University of North Carolina. He shot up the draft boards during the scouting combines with his elite athleticism and performance during the scrimmages. He’s projected as a top-level defender of multiple positions.
• With the 26th selection, the Nets added 19-year-old Ben Saraf, a 6’6″ point guard from Israel. Last season, Saraf played professionally in Germany and is considered an elite passer with great size at his position who, like Traore, will need to work on his shooting.
• With the 27th selection, the Nets added 21-year-old Danny Wolf, a 6’11” forward who played last season at the University of Michigan after two seasons at Yale University. Wolf is known for his unique ball-handling and passing skills for a player of his size, and he manned the point guard position for long stretches for Michigan.

Immediately after the draft, some respected reporters and analysts were critical of the choices, with one insider suggesting that other front-office types around the league were laughing at the Nets’ draft night performance. Nets’ fans joined the snicker party as well, pointing out perceived missed opportunities–largely based on someone else’s published mock draft boards–to select better players.

The Nets drafted individual players, but they were clearly looking for a certain type of player, the type who fits the ball-movement philosophy of the current star of the team, Head Coach Jordi Fernandez. They are hoping developments over time will afford them the last laugh.

GENERAL MANAGER SEAN MARKS’ SUPPORTERS AND DETRACTORS

You can’t talk about the Nets’ personnel moves over the past nine years without mentioning the General Manager, Sean Marks, who has become a bit of a polarizing figure among the Nets’ fan base. Though not an exhaustive list, Marks’ supporters will bring up the following:

• Marks walked into a minefield after the trade with the Boston Celtics, where the Nets sent unprotected first-round picks (two of which became Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown) to the Celtics in exchange for a couple of future Hall-of-Famers on the downside of their careers. With the Nets drafting late in the first round at the beginning of Marks’ tenure, they were able to select and develop players like Jarrett Allen and Caris Levert while adding young players like D’Angelo Russell via trade. Within a couple of years under the tutelage of Head Coach Kenny Atkinson (a Sean Marks hire), the Nets qualified for the postseason.
• During the early years of Sean Marks’ tenure, the Nets earned a reputation as having one of the better player development programs in the NBA. The team was fun to watch and popular with the hometown fans. That reputation, along with tons of salary cap space, enabled the Nets to outbid teams like the Knicks for the services of free agents Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. They would later add James Harden via trade, giving the Nets a formidable threesome expected to compete for NBA titles for several years.
• Once the Durant/Irving/Harden experiment fizzled, the Nets were left with a middling squad, not good enough to contend. And they couldn’t rebuild because many of their first-round picks were sent to Houston. That is, until Marks pulled off a deal with the Knicks that landed the Nets five first-round picks plus a first-round swap in exchange for Mikal Bridges. They also swung a deal with Houston to recoup some of the picks they sent to Houston to get Harden, putting them in position to do a full rebuild.
• Without the benefit of a lottery pick until 2025, the Nets have still been able to find players late in the first (and even second) round of recent drafts who are at least rotation players on the current squad. Nic Claxton (31st selection in 2019), Cam Thomas (27th selection in 2021), Day’Ron Sharpe (29th selection in 2021), Noah Clowney (21st selection in 2023, and Jalen Wilson (53rd selection in 2023) were all late finds who still contribute.

Of course, Sean Marks also has his detractors, many of who have been vocal since draft night. Though not an exhaustive list, among the complaints are:

• The Nets, and Marks in particular, fumbled the trio of Durant, Irving and Harden. The three were never able to see court time together, playing only 16 games together as a trio and never advanced past the NBA Eastern Conference semifinals. They felt the Irving contract situation could have been handled better once he reached the end of his,and their inability to reach an agreement, Durant requested to leave. Likewise, the Nets should have held out for more than Ben Simmons from Philadelphia as the centerpiece in return for James Harden, even though the Nets had zero leverage. The current Cam Thomas contractual situation, where the team stands to let him walk away as an unrestricted free agent in July of 2026 only adds to the frustration.
• Marks jumped the gun on removing the interim head coach tag for Jacque Vaughn and giving him the position after Steve Nash left. Vaughn had gained the reputation as a strong assistant coach but not the right head coach for this situation. Many also felt the Kenny Atkinson situation could have been handled better, where it appeared a power struggle with the newly-signed free agents eventually cost Atkinson his head coaching gig.
• Marks has never been able to land the services of a strong inside presence on either end of the court. Nic Claxton is solid and a better-than-average defender, but gets pushed around by bigger, stronger centers and has an unrefined offensive game away from the basket. As a result, the Nets have had difficulty closing out defensive possessions with rebounds and getting high-percentage shots in the low-post area on offense for years.
• In the 2025 Draft, not only did the Nets not tank hard enough during the 2024-25 season to increase their chances for a top-five selection, ending up with the eighth pick, but they reached when they used that pick to select Egor Demin. At the same time, critics felt the Nets should have packaged a couple of their five picks to move up in the 2025 Draft, considered strong compared to other years. In the end, it’s believed the Nets selected five players with no star potential in the bunch, five mostly unathletic players who can move the ball around but none who can score.

TOUGH CROWD, BUT WE DON’T KNOW ANYTHING YET

The Nets drafted four 19-year-olds and a 21-year-old in June’s NBA Draft. With only summer league play, some preseason games, and about a week’s worth of NBA regular season games to evaluate the rookies, many have already made their final assessments as to what kind of careers these young players will have. Even with the understanding that most NBA draftees never last more than two years in the league, it’s simply too early to make assumptions about any of these rookies.

We shouldn’t take out our frustrations with the General Manager’s other personnel decisions on the young players. 19-year-olds are going to have their ups and downs, they will make mistakes, lose confidence, gain it back, hit the rookie wall, turn the ball over, go into shooting slumps, and won’t be able to play NBA defense right away. But they’ll also show flashes of what they can do and will aim to work on doing it more consistently while getting stronger. And it’s not just the Nets’ rookies who will struggle. Even the rookies the Nets “passed over” to select the ones currently on the roster, as well as the rookies already selected by the time the Nets turn came up, are going to have a learning curve. We’re seeing it already. So there’s no need to use a good game by a rookie not selected by the Nets as evidence they made the wrong choice(s). There’s a bad game right around the corner for those guys, too. The established veterans in the league rode the same rollercoaster as rookies and second-year players.

THE BROOKLYN NETS HOPE FOR THE LAST LAUGH

In only the second week of the 2025-26 NBA season, The Brooklyn Nets appear to be headed for a historically bad season in terms of wins and losses. But they knew this team would not contend and are in a full rebuild, so the emphasis is on the development of their five rookies and other players on the roster light on experience. With a strong group of players expected to enter the 2026 NBA Draft, the Nets will be in position to add one to their roster. With a multitude of future picks, which can be used to draft more players or trade for established ones, and a favorable salary cap situation, the Nets merely need to play their cards right in order to climb back to relevance.

The hard-core Sean Marks detractors will likely always be in that camp. Every GM makes mistakes. To be fair, when discussing the Nets’ and Marks’ fumbled “Big Three” it’s only fair to point out that two of the three (Durant and Irving) had left two teams prior to joining the Nets, while Harden left Houston on not the best of terms. Likewise, in about three years or less, two of those players (Harden and Durant) are already on their second team since leaving Brooklyn. The rules allow for player movement so no criticism there, but Marks has had plenty of company in terms of losing these players.

The General Manager widely acknowledged as the best of the 30, Oklahoma City’s Sam Presti, also used a stockpile of draft picks and some shrewd trades to build his Thunder squad to championship status in 2025. But Presti is the same GM who drafted Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden, had all of them together in Oklahoma City, and lost all three either via trade or free agency without winning a title. It took a while to rebuild, but Presti and the Oklahoma City Thunder got the last laugh.

The Brooklyn Nets hope to do the same.