The greatness of Breaking Bad comes from the rationality of Walter White’s descent into evil.
There is no singular event or moment where he transforms from a ‘good person’ into a fundamentally bad one – there is only a series of compromises, each one understandable at the time, but each one irretrievably taking away a part of him.
Enough compromises and all of a sudden you’ve gone from high school teacher with a heart of gold to New Mexico’s pre-eminent drug kingpin.
The Brooklyn Nets are Walter White. They have no singular lamentable catastrophe which was self-evident at the moment it occurred. They’ve made a series of decisions and compromises which were defensible at the time, but the culmination of all of them has left the team with the bleakest future in American professional sports.
Where Walter White’s actions cost him his family, Brooklyn’s have cost them draft picks until 2019.
It’s easy to trace Brooklyn’s present debacle back to the Paul Pierce/Kevin Garnett trade or the myopia of Mikhail Prokhorov or Billy King, but in essence the Nets debacle comes down to the fact that they put all their eggs in the basket of the wrong man.
Deron Williams, the Jesse Pinkman of this story – the guy who always shows flashes of competence before inevitably reverting back to his woebegone nature – was supposed to be the saviour. The NBA was shocked when the Nets pulled off the trade for Williams in February 2011.
It came out of nowhere, with the league focused on the Carmelo Anthony sweepstakes which the Nets came up short in. After getting dumped by Melo the Nets pulled off what looked like being one of the great rebound hook-ups of all time, stealing D-Will, thought of at the time as Chris Paul’s equal, for less than what the Knicks paid for Anthony.
In a lot of ways, the next four years in Brooklyn were a painful exercise in the team convincing themselves that they’d taken home the supermodel with brains they thought they had, and not the damaged goods that they were stuck with in reality.
Everything comes back to Deron. In a bid to satisfy Williams ahead of his upcoming free agency by surrounding him with competent players after a dreadfully uncompetitive first year with the Nets, Brooklyn traded its lottery pick which ended up being Damian Lillard to Portland in 2012 for a rapidly ageing Gerald Wallace. Following the same logic, they took on the gargantuan contract of Joe Johnson that summer to give Williams a back-court running mate.
A blistering second half to the 2012-13 season from Williams reinforced the idea that he was still a franchise player and the Nets were close to contention. D-Will was never a natural leader though, and the team’s lack of leadership and intestinal fortitude showed in the playoff series loss to the undermanned Bulls. So Brooklyn gave Williams the locker room leaders he needed by effectively trading four first round picks to Boston for Pierce and Garnett.
That didn’t work out.
Williams is gone now and when you look at all the big decisions that the Nets have made over the past five years – trading for Williams and signing him to a max deal, the trades for Wallace, Garnett and Pierce, and taking on Johnson’s contract – they look so comically dreadful that it’s no wonder that the team is where it is today. But hindsight has tinted glasses, and in reality, most of those decisions were somewhat rational and entirely defensible at the time.
The Williams trade and his max deal were no brainers. He was a superstar. The Johnson trade is less defensible, but when you think of the context – the Nets were moving to Brooklyn and they needed to have a competitive team upon arrival, and the only way they were doing that was with a re-signed Williams, which the Johnson trade helped facilitate – it’s at least understandable. And Johnson did give the Nets four solid years before he died this season.
The Pierce/Garnett trade might end up being the most debilitating trade in NBA history. Because of it the Nets have no hope and no future until 2019 at the earliest. But in a league where so many teams exist in the comfortable middle tier of respectable, ultimately meaningless competitiveness, the Nets took a shot.
It was a shot largely in hope more than anything, but it had just enough force behind it that it wasn’t simply a misguided prayer. If Williams maintained his electric form from the end of the previous season and if the bus from Boston to New York didn’t drastically accelerate the ageing process for Pierce and Garnett, the Nets could have challenged Miami in the east.
Brooklyn also offloaded Gerald Wallace’s albatross deal in that trade (which, admittedly, they were dumb enough to sign him to in the first place) and taken in conjunction with the signings of Andrei Kirilenko and Shaun Livingston, the Boston trade created the blueprint for the Nets that Prokhorov and Jay-Z had been saying was coming for years.
Of course, it ended up being a blueprint for sporting hell. But the Nets didn’t know that at the time, and although murmurs around the league suggested that Brooklyn over played its hand by offering too much too early, the trade had a logic to it that was strangely admirable and understandable, if not entirely compelling.
The crescendo effect of all Brooklyn’s decisions since what turned out to be the original sin of trading for Deron Williams has left them totally and utterly broken. They have nobody running their team, no real coach and no meaningful pieces for the future. They have no hope.
Brook Lopez and Thaddeus Young form the team’s core, which is not a sentence that should exist. On a good team they would be the third and sixth best players on the roster, not the top two. The most promising thing for the Nets is that Rondae-Hollis Jefferson might not suck. This is where we are with Brooklyn.
Just don’t lump the Nets in with the other self-inflicted NBA catastrophes in recent history. Nothing they did was as foolish as the James Harden trade or whatever Isiah Thomas did whenever he picked up the phone running the Knicks. The Nets are Walter White and not Tony Soprano – their descent has been sympathetic, not inevitable. The decisions that burned them all had merit and some conception of logic.
Well, except for the Gerald Wallace trade. That was terrible.
There will undoubtedly be upset results here and there in the NBA playoffs but there’s an overwhelming sense of fait accompli that Boston will…
https://twitter.com/KatieMox/status/1780695947481174464 https://twitter.com/CWilliamson44/status/1780696642917994703
LeBron James is going back to the Olympics for the first time in 12 years. Steph Curry is headed to the games for the…
The only realistic threat to Boston’s chances of strolling through the Eastern Conference is a team that could still end up in the play-in…
Australian guards Dante Exum and Josh Giddey have both come up big for their NBA clubs in crucial wins in the lead-in to the…
Minnesota Timberwolves fans have endured plenty of pain in their 35 years of being a laughing stock in the NBA. In all that time,…
