12. Brooklyn Nets
The Brooklyn Nets did really well this summer. I mean, they beat out their in-state rivals (the New York Knicks) in the Kevin Durant/Kyrie Irving sweepstakes. Does it get much better than that?
If Durant hadn’t ruptured his Achilles tendon, the Nets would enter the 2019-2020 season as a top-5 team in the NBA. Now, they’re merely a playoff team. That’s not a bad thing, though. They’ll have one season of Kyrie leading a team full of developing youngsters before KD joins the party.
Is a Kyrie Irving-led team good enough to make serious noise in the playoffs? I doubt it. We basically saw this same thing play out in Boston last season. But they’ll still be a team that wins a lot of games and has the potential to beat some really good teams.
Maybe I’m wrong about the Nets being incapable of making a deep playoff run next season, though. The case could be made that the Nets actually have a better young core than the Celtics did last year. Caris LeVert is legitimately good, Spencer Dinwiddie is solid, Jarrett Allen is a monstrous big man and Joe Harris is a sniper. Maybe Kyrie playing alongside all those dudes will actually work out.
Oh! I forgot to mention that they also gave an aging DeAndre Jordan (who’s 20% of what he used to be) a $40 million contract. Congrats, Nets!