Nets Are Scorching

I've got a feeling these two men wouldn't work well together.

Those of you that follow baseball closely are surely familiar with Michael Lewis’s timeless book Moneyball, a look into the managing practices of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics in 2002. The book is fascinating, and worth a purchase if you’re interested at all in the function of behind-the-scenes sports business practices.

In the book, Lewis details some of Beane’s mantras, which include:

• Don’t ever settle.
• The day you say you have to do something, you’re screwed. Because you are going to make a bad deal. You can always recover from the player you didn’t sign. You may never recover from the player you signed at the wrong price.
• Sometimes the best looking guy or girl isn’t the best asset, and getting them doesn’t result in success.

Over the course of this past season, right up until the trade deadline, I made it a point to read Moneyball a couple of times. I thought about what made those A’s teams so successful despite their financial standing, and how powerful those messages could be to a team that actually had the money to make things happen, even in a sport with a completely different financial structure. Just imagine the Knicks in the Isaiah Thomas era if they’d heeded even one of these rules. No insane contracts to Stephon Marbury, Eddy Curry, Jerome James, et al. No $40 million over the salary cap. No worst record of the decade.

Now think about the Nets. Day after day, we heard it. “The Nets need a superstar.” That was cool. “They need an impact player.” That was cool, too. “They need someone who can change the game single-handedly on both sides of the floor.” Totally agreed. They absolutely did need someone who could immediately become the face of the franchise and aid the team on their path to win a championship.

But somewhere along the line, “The Nets need a superstar” became “The Nets need Carmelo Anthony.”

And that wasn’t cool.

I’m not exactly sure when or how it happened. Maybe it was always in the air after the LeBron sweepstakes ended with the Nets signing Travis Outlaw. Maybe the story was written that way in September, when Derrick Favors’ face was removed from NJNets.com and a deal appeared imminent. Maybe it was one of the other half-dozen times when it appeared destined that Carmelo Anthony would end up in a New Jersey Nets uniform throughout the season one way or another.

Either way, it was never the truth. In this man’s opinion, anyway.

Many people disagreed with me – many people still do. One of those guys writes for this site, and made a hell of an argument in his favor. While I never disagreed with the premise – the Nets always needed a superstar – where we did diverge is the idea that Carmelo was “the one”.

For what it’s worth, Carmelo Anthony looks the part. He plays the part. He has that “it” factor: he walks with a swagger and can seemingly score on anyone at will. Derrick Rose has that. Kobe Bryant, too. Opposing defenses have to structure their gameplan around him. He is the guy that you let carry the team, for better or for worse. He would have, without a doubt, completely changed the culture of the New Jersey Nets.

So we – the fans, the journalists, the bloggers, the whoever – ascribed the “he’s a superstar” label to Carmelo Anthony. Which, again, was cool. Kind of. Until it became “he’s the superstar.” He became the antithesis of Billy Beane’s rules: the Nets (and us) thought he was the best-looking guy, said “we have to get him,” and spent the better part of eight months trying to force a bad deal.

For those of you that get stuck in the great-terrible binary: It’s not that Carmelo Anthony is a bad player. It’s never been that. He’s never been that. What this was always about was whether or not Carmelo Anthony can be the first player, the max guy, the “superstar” on a championship team. Given the showing by New York this spring, the answer to that is still very much in doubt.

No matter who the Nets would have gotten or what the Nets would have done, they automatically made the right move merely by not making the move. They saved $65 million that they would have used on a guy who would help them more in the box office than the Atlantic Division. They were then able to use that flexibility, and still have some left over.

Thankfully, the Nets got lucky. For whatever reason you choose to believe this week – whether Carmelo just screwed with New Jersey, whether Prokhorov held the cards all along and used the Melo deal as leverage, or anything else – they didn’t settle. They didn’t overspend, lose their upside, and need to scramble to recover. They didn’t fall into the “need” trap that was set. They didn’t end up making the wrong deal. At the 23rd hour, they made the right one.

Ryan Jones at SB Nation claims that Billy King and the Nets will target the best players available with the 27th and 35th picks in the upcoming draft.

The Nets are hoping to draft instant impact players but the reality is that this season’s draft is just not too great. Unfortunately, the instability of the labor negotiations prevents King from wheeling and dealing the picks in trades. However, drafting smartly can cause a team to stumble upon an All-Star late in the first round. Let’s hope that this draft is not as weak as the pundits are claiming.

Brook Lopez is a seven-footer, starts at the center position on the New Jersey Nets, and is pegged as one of the future building blocks for the rebuilding franchise. However, Lopez averages just 6.0 rebounds per game, which is pitiful for a man of his caliber and size. That said, Lopez’ rebounding issues are severely overstated and dramatized by the media and Nets fans alike. Consider this: Avery Johnson asked Lopez to take the reins of the offense scheme this season as opposed to last season (where there was no system). This caused Lopez to run the floor in transition as the Nets depended on the forwards to scoop up the defensive rebound.

Also consider that the Nets finished the season with a total rebound rate of 49.45%, one of the few things the Nets did that was around the league average. With elite rebounders like Kris Humphries, the Nets didn’t necessarily need Lopez to take on a rebounding role as opposed to what was a desperate need for offense this season.

I also have my doubts as to how healthy Lopez was this season. He battled mononucleosis over the Summer of Travis Outlaw and dealt with a calcium deposit most of the season. He received surgery for it on Wednesday. Both mono and a calcium deposit would affect the physicality of a player such as Lopez. While Lopez never had exceptional rebounding skill, he was pretty good during his first two seasons. I would expect that after Lopez takes the offseason to heal, he will restore his rebounding numbers back to their original level.

However, the one thing that ticked me off about the criticism of Lopez’s board scoring prowess was that people began to take Lopez for granted. Brook isn’t an All-Star, but there are very few centers in the NBA with his scoring ability. Only three centers averaged more than 20 points per game this season and Lopez was one of them. In terms of PER (largely a measure of offensive efficiency) Lopez ranked seventh, but was behind three players who played less than thirty minutes per game this season. Despite this, Brook has received scorn by Nets fans for his rebounding and isn’t considered the valuable commodity that he is. Lopez may not be the best center in the NBA, but he’s in the second-tier conversation.

I would not trade him for any center in the league except for Dwight Howard.

Brook Lopez is by no means a complete player. It is imperative that he heads to the gym, bulks up, and picks up a few tips from the coaching staff about rebounding. However, Lopez is still the second best player on the Nets and is a valuable piece in our future. His below average rebounding stats this season should not undermine his accomplishments to the degree that they have this season.

I’ll let Avery Johnson finish this for me.

“He had a nice finish to our season and played in 82 games. That is pretty rare for an NBA player, especially for a center. If you look at his production, he got better, he even had a few games where he had 10-plus rebounds and he’s 23 years old, okay?”

Yahoo! Sports’ Mark Miller looks into the possibility of Deron Williams playing basketball overseas if a lockout occurs:

“I’m already looking into playing overseas,” said Williams, . “I haven’t looked anywhere in general; I’m just looking into the possibility of playing over there. But I’m not going to make a decision until after the CBA.

This shows the compassion and love for the game that Deron seems to have. Williams already has enough money to live through a long lockout under comfortable terms, yet is still looking into playing overseas to keep his strength and spirit in shape.

So, CSKA Moscow anybody?

Let’s take a trip back in time.

It’s December 1st, 2010. The 6-12 Nets are without Devin Harris and are competing against the 12-6 Oklahoma City Thunder. Kevin Durant is also out, but the Nets don’t really stand a chance in this one, so we think. By “we,” I mean my lady friend and I, who watched this game together. I highlight that point because I’ll always remember this night as the one that she – a die-hard Celtics fan – started using the word “we” when referring to the Nets. She’s a fan first, and she started chanting things like “we’ve gotta get this stop!” or “what are we doing out there!?” It was in this tumultuous game that she became emotionally invested in the Nets. The biggest of small victories.

We had to have one bad one, didn't we? (AP Photo/Bill Kostroun)

Anyway, we picked it up late. I had a game of my own to play that evening, and as a result I don’t start watching the Nets until the fourth quarter. I turn it on, and see the Nets down 77-69 with about eight minutes to go.

I figure it’s over, but the Nets don’t die right away. Brook Lopez carries the Nets through the fourth. Anthony Morrow hits an improbable three as regulation expires. The Nets quickly build a lead in the first overtime, but Russell Westbrook brings the Thunder back, and the game goes into a second overtime. Again, the Nets build a lead, and look to have it in the bag, until…

Stephen Graham.

We’ve made some silly notes about the incompetence of Stephen Graham on the basketball court before, and I’d like to make it clear: he seems like a very nice man that has absolutely no business being on an NBA roster. To his credit, he can hit an open 18-footer about 50 percent of the time, and occasionally bug opposing guards into poor shooting nights. At his essence, though, Graham is a 6’7″ mass that, in the most literal sense, occupies a space on the floor. He’s what Ron Artest would be if Artest had no work ethic, desire, or trace of insanity; just a lifeless mass floating across the landscape of basketball courts.

By this point, December 1st, 2010, I didn’t really mind Stephen Graham all that much. This is mostly because he hadn’t really played yet – outside of a blowout victory against the lesser Los Angeles, Graham hadn’t been a regular in the rotation. He’d only played in 11 of the first 18 games, and had played less than five minutes in over half of them. He was playing his role as an 11th man, and in that role, I found solitude.

But at this moment, Stephen Graham did the unthinkable, and set the tone for the remainder of his season.

With five seconds left in double overtime, the Nets held a 110-107 lead and a foul to give. The Thunder, inbouding in their halfcourt, set a double screen on Travis Outlaw & Kris Humphries, allowing Jeff Green to catch the ball at the top right of the key. Graham starts off doing the right thing, immediately sensing the screen and picking up Green as he catches the ball.

At this point, Graham has 2 options:

1) Play Green up tight, but since he’s 29 feet from the basket and not the best offensive player on the floor, keep your hands up to contest and don’t foul right away

2) Give the foul, but do so in a way that absolutely prevents Green from shooting

Graham, of course, chose door number three.

Graham grabs down but without strength (see right), allowing Green to shoot. The shot is wild but surprisingly close, bouncing on the rim a few times before finally falling out. The foul is obvious, though Graham appears to gesture at the referee in disagreement. The crowd is in shock. Rookie Damion James shakes his head in disbelief. I slumped back in my chair, almost laughing at the utter madness of the play. Graham is quickly taken out of the game, Jeff Green hits all three free throws, and Westbrook takes over again in the third overtime. The rest is history.

In case the status granted to this play by this award doesn’t make it clear, the moment Stephen Graham reached in to foul Jeff Green was perhaps the single greatest mental lapse by any Nets player in a season chock-full of them. If you foul in that situation, you take a guy down. There is no way he gets a shot up. Either way, fouling that quickly is a huge question mark, especially considering that it would have taken at least another second to create a real shot, more if he decides to pass it off to James Harden.

Instead, Jeff Green recognized the contact being initiated, quickly formed a shooting motion, and was a rim-bounce away from turning Graham’s mishap from the Nets’ worst play of the year into the Nets’ worst play of the decade.

*       *       *       *       *       *       *

What’s even more shocking to me than anything else when looking at this in retrospect was how this game somehow predicated Graham’s inclusion in the lineup. Morrow’s injury had a part in that, but the Nets also had Sasha Vujacic at this point and didn’t need Graham to play a bunch of minutes. He wasn’t really providing anything at any point that made his inclusion in the lineup a necessity.

(Read those last two sentences again. Try to fight the urge to drown yourself.)

That said, this game seemed to have the opposite of the expected effect on Graham’s playing time. Before this game, Graham played in 11 of 18 contests, averaging less than 7 minutes per game. Afterwards? 18.7 minutes per game, in 46 of the 62 games. According to Basketball-Reference, Graham had a Game Score of less than 0 in 20 of these 46 post-play games (25 total). Ironically, one of Graham’s best Game Scores came in this triple-overtime game – and that score was 7. I guess those scores just don’t count mind-numbingly stupid fouls that completely change the course of the game.

But alas, I wasn’t the genius that summed it up. That credit goes to the lady, the newfound Nets fan. After 22 years of watching the Celtics, she was unsure of how to react to Graham’s error. It was like she couldn’t process what had happened; she was used to intelligent basketball at this point and these sorts of mistakes just did not compute. After a second or two, she sighed, turned to me, and said something I don’t think she’d said in a long time:

“Wow, we suck.”

In an interview with Ryan Rusillo and Scott Van Pelt of ESPN, Deron Williams stated that all the Nets need are some players. Here is the direct quote:

“To be honest with you, we just have to get players.  That’s it.  Everything else is great: the organization is great from top to bottom, the owner is committed to winning…committed to getting players. That’s the bottom line. We have to get some players.”

Deron also took a shot at the Utah Jazz franchise in the interview. He claimed that the Nets are committed to winning and know what to do to keep him, while the situation in Utah “wasn’t as easy”.

It definitely looked like Williams is still optimistic about the Nets’ future. Mikhail Prokhorov and Billy King seemed to have impressed him in some way. Now they just have to go out and get those players…

Expectations were not high for Kris Humphries when the Nets traded (of all people) Eduardo Najera for him and Shawne Williams midway through last year. He had a reputation as a selfish brute short on skill with even less of a mental grasp for the game of basketball. In unsurprising fashion, he lived up to those impossibly lofty standards for the rest of the Nets’ historically hilarious 2009-2010 campaign.

This season didn’t look to be all that great for him right off the bat, either. The Nets were fresh off a deal to acquire the at-one-point-talented Troy Murphy, who was supposed to start, and with Derrick Favors on the roster, too (though it’s unclear if he ever actually cared enough about the team to unpack his bags), it was looking like Humphries wouldn’t see much more than mop-up duty.

But there’s a lesson in this: make every effort to find a roster spot in the NBA behind Murphy. He showed up to camp sluggish and out of shape, and a back injury kept him out of games for awhile. Humphries was tabbed the man to start in his massive void.

I had my reservations about that decision for a couple reasons: (1) Look at how Brook Lopez developed his rookie season while starting almost the entire season for the incomparably incompetent Josh Boone. Wouldn’t that work for Favors, too? And (2) Humphries had yet to prove he could be good at basketball.

Certainly he didn’t get on anyone’s good side by completely emasculating Lopez on the glass, and his relentless penchant to shoot the woefully inefficient 17-foot jump shot didn’t endear him to the basketball public much either. But much like George Costanza or a catchy commercial jingle, all it took was some forced exposure to hop on the Humphries bandwagon.

If there was one thing that made Hump a really lovable player was that he actually cared. One couldn’t say that for many Nets players this season, but Humphries wanted to excel on the court every time he laced up his shoes. Sometimes that drive manifested itself well (e.g., his hunger for rebounding) and others it did not (e.g., his unwavering commitment to shoot after beginning a dribble), but at least he was invested in winning.

(How sad is it when you place players in high regard simply because they care?)

Soon enough, Humphries was the lifeblood of the team. If it didn’t come via rebounding, it came via an electrifying transition dunk or an even more ridiculous block, but he became the vagrant’s Blake Griffin for Nets fans. Of course, it’s fair to say that Humphries’ spontaneous improvement might simply have been an ancillary benefit to his developing relationship with a person who shouldn’t be famous, and of course there were plenty of jokes to that same effect.

It’s funny that Nets followers went from praying every night last summer that Humphries wouldn’t exercise his player option so that the team would have more cap space to pursue a player better than Travis Outlaw in free agency to wanting desperately to re-sign him a summer later.

While Humphries’ contributions have been most stellar and most surprising, negotiations with Humphries should be a proceed-with-caution affair on the part of the Nets’ front office. Here are two reasons why:

(1) The Fluke Rule: It’s entirely possible that Humphries’ improvement was just a one-year foray from his typical substandard production; or, more likely …

(2) The Contract-Year Phenomenon: It’s an all-too-common occurrence in the NBA for players to ratchet up their efforts in the final year of their deals to sucker a team to pay them a lot of money for a lot of years thereafter, and it’s very possible Humphries has followed in these players’ footsteps. All the Nets can hope is that he’ll follow the Zach Randolph model of signing a ridiculously lucrative contract and then going Super Saiyan on the rest of the NBA.

Personally, I don’t think Humphries can be more than a $6-million-per-year investment for the franchise going forward. I realize what Humphries did for the team this year, stepping in to partially carry a limping team, but who knows if he can or will duplicate this year’s production? It’s kind of disheartening, but I’m not so sure all the money in his pocket next season won’t siphon the passion that made him such an asset this year.

Nevertheless, kudos on a surprising season to Kris Humphries.

With the addition of superstar guard Deron Williams (feels so good to say that), the Nets team as a whole is optimistic. However, Mariner Eccles of isportsweb.com takes that optimism to a whole new level by claiming that the Nets can make the NBA Finals as early as next season. Eccles compares the situation that the Nets are in now to the state of the franchise in the early 2000s after the addition of Jason Kidd.

While it is great to express optimism about the Nets, something that was severely lacking before the mega-deal, I think Eccles takes it a bit too far. He calls Kris Humphries a better version of Kenyon Martin, but Martin was an All-Star caliber player during those playoff runs. It is also unlikely that Travis Outlaw turns it around the way Lucious Harris did or that Sasha Vujacic plays the way Harris did (it’s unlikely that Sasha is even on the team next season).

However, I still laud Eccles for giving the Nets more than the pessimistic views that the New York media generally heaps upon the Nets while fawning over the Knicks. I hope that he’s right and I’m wrong…