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Well, that’s a pretty straightforward equation for the Nets now. There is only one end result that can possibly justify what they did on Wednesday afternoon.
They must win an NBA championship.
They are set to complete a parade route that will begin at the Barclays Center, where Atlantic meets Flatbush, culminates in a rally in the tape-drenched large Boro Hall plaza, with the Brooklyn Bridge proudly overseeing the whole party, not far from the old Dodgers. sits on Montague Street.
Otherwise, the deal Sean Marks struck on Wednesday will remain the most ridiculous swap in sports history. Marks brings James Harden to Brooklyn, teaming up with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, whenever Irving decides to return to work.
It will be a mind blowing basketball for many nights. The Nets, already a dynamic offensive carnival act, can score 150 points on some nights. The Nets, already a deplorable defensive team, could well allow 150 points some nights. It will be impossible not to look.
And it’s swell.
But there is only one acceptable result now. When you get rid of three useful players – Caris LeVert, Jarrett Allen and Taurean Prince – and three unprotected No.1 picks (2022, ’24, ’26) and four swaps (2021, ’23, ’25, ’27 ) for a 31-year-old shooter with a question mark playoff past who desperately wanted to team up with Durant to change that perception …
Well, there is only one possible outcome.
Getting the Bucks to seven games in an epic Eastern Finals won’t be enough. Falling against the Lakers in a memorable final? Nope. The Nets aren’t just all-in for the next 2-3 years, they’re all in for the rest of the decade. Their viability exists in the here and now, defined by a simple equation:
Parade or no parade?
Even the Yankees haven’t thrown all of their chips in the middle of a table like this, for all their daring free agent follies. It was just money. The same was true for the group of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh of Heat in 2010, a brash maneuver that now looks picturesque.
Perhaps the only other trade that falls under the same sentence as this was the Oct. 12, 1989 trade that sent Dallas backer Herschel Walker to Minnesota in exchange for eight future Vikings draft picks. The Cowboys ultimately won two Super Bowls. The Vikings went 21-21 with Walker.
Next to that, it will look like Brock-for-Broglio unless the Nets win a title.
Acquiring Harden isn’t the weird part of this; there have been plenty of voices (this one included) who have suggested that if the Nets were for a dime – having imported Durant and Irving before – they should be for a dollar, go bankrupt with Harden.
But at this price?
Former Nets general manager Billy King has been derided indefinitely for the deal he struck in 2013 that brought Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to Brooklyn and sent a host of picks to Boston – and to rightly. Marks was hired to erase the memory of this mistake. In November, he actually said this:
“I think we want to build something sustainable here. It’s not something that’s a fleeting moment like going all-in and in a year or two we are sitting here like, ‘Great, now we have to completely rebuild everything and we don’t have the assets. rebuild with. ‘So there is that side.
It sounded good. And now reads like a parody, like a farce, like madness, and now it’s a joint King-Marks wonder fact that the Nets will spend 14 years – from 2014 to 2027 – without once controlling their first-round pick. Read this sentence again. Staging.
Maybe Irving’s problems raised the bar for Marks. Perhaps the allure of bringing these three talents together was worth forgetting Harden’s recent behavior, which had been toxic, or Irving’s lingering problems, whatever they were.
(And maybe Marks should have just done what Houston did shortly after agreeing to this deal, swap LeVert at Indiana for Victor Oladipo; maybe this deal would have been a lot smarter than this one, to a fraction of the cost.)
It is impossible to know.
Only one thing is certain:
No team in the history of sport has ever had to win a championship to justify its existence. Until now. Until these nets. As of now, there is only one qualifying final result: Barclays at Borough Hall, the O’Brien Trophy in tow.
Everything else will be unacceptable. No, in fact: it’s more than that:
Everything else will be an abject failure.
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