Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov empowered his general manager, Billy King, to do whatever it took to put a true title contender on the floor inside Barclays Center this season.
After King completed a whirlwind summer — including a blockbuster trade with the Celtics to acquire Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry, plus the value signing of the summer in Andrei Kirilenko — it appears he has done just that. Entering this season, the Nets rank alongside the Heat (bidding for three straight titles and four straight Finals trips) and Rockets (featuring newly-signed Dwight Howard) as one of the NBA’s most compelling teams.
Now, though, comes the hard part for new coach Jason Kidd’s team: having it come together on the floor.
The Nets should have enough talent to hang with the top teams in the Eastern Conference, and most predict they will surpass the Knicks and claim the Atlantic Division crown. Just winning a division title, however, isn’t going to be enough for a team that has made it clear their goal is as big as their price tag: to win it all.
The Starting Five
1. How will the veterans hold up?
Not only did the Nets put together an expensive roster this offseason, they put together one heavily reliant on players with lots of miles on their legs. Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Jason Terry, Joe Johnson, Andrei Kirilenko and Reggie Evans have played double-digit seasons in the league, while Brook Lopez is the team’s only key player who is 25 or younger.
In fact, the Nets have four players — Garnett (first), Pierce (fifth), Terry (13th) and Johnson (14th) — inside the top 15 in active minutes played, all of whom have played at least 33,000 minutes.
That’s why coach Jason Kidd has made it clear from the beginning he is establishing an open line of communication with his veterans — specifically Garnett and, to a lesser extent, Pierce — about restricting their minutes and games played in order to have them as healthy and fresh as possible for the playoffs.
If the Nets want to make the kind of deep playoff run they clearly expect to after assembling a roster that will cost more than $100 million in payroll alone — and with luxury taxes factored in will approach $190 million — they will need their aging players to make it through the season relatively unscathed.
2. Can Deron Williams return to elite status?
The first season in Brooklyn for Williams was a tale of two seasons. In the first half, Williams looked sluggish, averaging 16.7 points and 7.6 assists while shooting 34.7 percent from 3-point range and looking nothing like the player the Nets thought they were getting when they locked him up for a five-year max contract in the offseason.
Then, after undergoing platelet-rich plasma treatment on both of his ailing ankles, cutting some weight and undergoing three different rounds of cortisone shots throughout the season, Williams looked like a completely different player after the break, averaging 22.9 points and 8.0 assists while shooting 42 percent from 3-point range. Williams came into the preseason nursing yet another ankle injury after spraining his right ankle last month in a workout in Utah, but looks as if he will enter the regular season fully healthy and without any complications after sitting out the first three weeks of camp.
If the Nets get the second half version of Williams for all — or at least the vast majority — of this season, they will have an excellent chance to meet their lofty expectations. If not, however, it’s hard to see how this team can do more than compete with the Knicks for fourth in the Eastern Conference.
3. Will Brook Lopez stay healthy?
Lopez looked durable enough last season, playing 75 games in the regular season and all seven in the playoffs while leading the team in scoring. But then Lopez found out after the season he had a bent screw in his surgically repaired right foot, leading to a third operation on that foot in the previous 18 months.
For a player of Lopez’s immense size — he came to training camp this year at 7-feet and 290 pounds — having multiple foot issues is a serious red flag, regardless of how minor the third procedure to replace the bent screw might have been.
There’s no question that as long as Lopez is on the court, he is at least in the conversation for the best offensive big man in the league, and has a legitimate case to be considered the very best. That’s the kind of piece a title team can be built around. But that also means Lopez is healthy, something the Nets simply have to have in order to be a contender.
4. Can the Nets have a top 10 defense?
Garnett has said the Nets are striving for a top three defense this season. Kidd, on the other hand, has aimed slightly lower, and has set the target at finishing inside of the top 10.
Even with the infusion of terrific defensive players such as Garnett and Kirilenko, the Nets still are going to have plenty of work to do if they want to make the climb even into the top 10 from where their defense was last year, when they finished tied for 18th in the league in defensive efficiency.
You will be hard-pressed to find a team that is a title contender without a top-10 defense, which is why Garnett, Pierce, Williams, Kidd and the rest of the Nets have stressed defense from the moment they got together. But saying it is one thing, doing it is another, and the Nets still have to prove they can do it.
5. Who is Coach Jason Kidd?
The Nets shocked the basketball world by installing Kidd — the best player in the franchise’s NBA history — as their head coach less than two weeks after he announced his retirement following the completion of his 19th and final NBA season with the Knicks.
The future first-ballot Hall of Fame floor general was then tasked with putting his imprint on this team much like he did 12 years ago when, after arriving in a trade from Phoenix, he led the Nets to their only two NBA Finals appearances in his first two years in New Jersey. That task only increased in intensity and scrutiny after the Nets geared up for a potential title run by pulling off the blockbuster trade with the Celtics, signing Kirilenko and re-signing Andray Blatche.
Kidd smartly surrounded himself with a terrific coaching staff, led by John Welch and Lawrence Frank, Kidd’s former coach with the Nets, to help make the transition from running a team from the point and running one from the bench as smooth as possible. It has gone well so far, but the judgment of Kidd’s coaching ability won’t come in November and December, but in April, May and — if the Nets have it their way — June.