Mikhail Prokhorov is looking to re-boot the Brooklyn Nets. Again.
“Frankly speaking, I deserve championship now much more than six years ago,” Prokhorov told the assembled media in Brooklyn on Monday. “I think we have been really bold, and we did our best in order to reach championship. I still believe with some luck our results might have been more promising.”
“I’m all in.”
Prokhorov admitted he’s made mistakes, the first of which—whether he publicly admits this or not—was thinking that the best way to challenge the crosstown Knicks was by emulating them. The right move, after all, would have been to bill themselves as the anti-Knicks, the George Costanza of New York basketball.
http://gty.im/458568164
The Knicks have always been the team that chases shiny names, views draft picks as ticking bombs you don’t want to hold onto and overpays aging stars. Rebuilding, or, for that matter, any type of building — meaning acquiring and developing young talent — has never really been a consideration. The goal has always been to win, and win right away. The priority has always been the present, the future almost always ignored.
“I take full responsibility for the state of the team,” Prokhorov said, “and I think Billy King did his best. Just we need a fresh look.”
“I think that I want us to have a much firmer blueprint for what kind of players we are looking for and why,” he continued. “I think we need to have a sense of identity with how we play.”
Of course, the results haven’t been pretty. Decades of losing, years of irrelevancy, seasons of shame.
And yet this was the blueprint the Nets and Prokhorov decided to follow in the years leading up to and following their move to Brooklyn in the summer of 2012. For about five years now Prokhorov and his cronies have seemingly been more focused on catching their cross-borough rival than building a functioning organization.
There was the midtown billboard in 2010, the one that hung over the Garden on 34th street and Eighth Avenue and which featured a Nets logo, Prokhorov’s face and (looking back this is the best part) the words “blueprint for greatness.” Then two years later Prokhorov referred to the Knicks as New York’s “second team.”
http://gty.im/170430428
At Monday’s press conference, he repeatedly talked about the facilities, calling the Barclays Center the best arena in the league and boasting about the team’s new practice facility. He repeatedly talked about lessons he learned, more about being in New York, and less about being in the NBA.
“The biggest lesson,” he offered, “is we are in New York. It’s a little bit a different animal.”
In a vacuum there’s nothing wrong with any of this. It’s always fun when owners are outspoken and poke at other franchises, when they show that billionaires can be petulant children too. Thing is, this was more than some harmless poking and it’s why the Nets are where they are now: coach-less, GM-less, asset-less.
And, worst of all, hopeless.
Who is running the Nets for now? Unclear within organization. Almost all learned of firings via news release.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 10, 2016
There’s not one team in the NBA who, if given the option, would swap rosters with the Nets. The Sixers are technically a worse team, but at least they have some good young players and they still own their future draft picks. The Lakers have two lottery picks getting minutes and, unlike the Nets, remain a respected organization.
Here’s what the Nets have, after their decision Sunday to fire Lionel Hollins, the sixth coach the team has fired since moving to Brooklyn four years ago (if you name them all you get a prize!) and re-assign general manager Billy King: A roster with so little talent that they’ve won just 10 games this season and lost 27. A team so boring, so hapless, that only three franchises are drawing fewer fans per game. A future bereft of draft picks (2020 is the next season the Nets’ pick isn’t tied to a trade or a swap).
All this could have been avoided if the Nets just built slowly, if they positioned themselves as the plucky fun upstart, one that gelled with the atmosphere and culture surrounding Atlantic Yards. One of the benefits of being the new team in town is that fans give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s OK to struggle a bit early on. It’s almost expected.
http://gty.im/171120370
And, yes, the Nets weren’t officially an expansion team. But they were certainly close. They changed their colors and formed a new brand (whatever that means). The goal, they said, was to embody Brooklyn.
Instead they became everything Brooklyn isn’t. Dull. Aging. Lethargic. Oh, did I mention dull?
“I want to stress one very important aspect and it’s really a great lesson,” Prokhorov said on Monday. “We’re playing in the best market in the world, and of course there is a market that makes great pressure, a lot of attention, a very active press. That’s why we need players and a coach who can resist with this pressure. Who can survive.”
Billy King gets most of the blame for what’s happened to the Nets, and there’s no point of even rehashing some his deals. They’re bad. Really bad. Isiah-esque (minus, of course, the sexual harassment). Let’s just leave it at that. But what we’ve learned about King over the years is that he does have at least one skill: he’s great at saying yes to his boss. This is a man who is reportedly helping Prokhorov find a new GM (a claim the owner denied on Monday, saying he will take King’s advice “as a friend” but not in any official basketball capacity on who the next GM should be). You think that’s someone who’s going to stand up to a gun-wielding former Vladimir Putin opponent and tell him that he’s going about his business all wrong?
King might have made some awful moves over the years. But there’s no doubt where the reckless organization philosophy that has morphed the Nets into the dumpster fire that they currently are originated from, just like it should come as no surprise that management’s solution to this current mess seems to be the pursuing the glitziest name of them all.
http://gty.im/158622771
John Calipari won’t fix the Nets. Neither will Mark Jackson or Tom Thibodeau. No coach will, no player will, no GM will. There’s no quick fix. There never has been. Building a winner takes patience and the Nets’ owner has none.
All this time Mikhail Prokhorov wanted to overtake the Knicks. Instead he’s becoming the second coming of their bumbling owner and turned the Nets into a rudderless sports franchise, something New York City already has plenty of.
