Well, now it’s a pretty simple equation for the Nets. There is only one end result that can justify what they did on Wednesday afternoon.
He has to win an NBA championship.
They have to make a parade route that will start from Barclays Center, where Atlantic meets Flatbush, culminates with a rally in the wide square of Boro Hall, bathed in marking tape, Brooklyn Bridge proudly watching the whole festivity, not far away by the Dodgers old headquarters on Montague Street.
Otherwise, the transaction that Sean Marks made on Wednesday will fall as the most ridiculous swap in the history of the sport. Marks brings James Harden to Brooklyn with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving whenever Irving decides to return to work.
This will be a little basketball in many nights. Nets, already a dynamic carnival offensive act, can get 150 points in a few nights. Nets, already a deplorable defensive team, can allow 150 points in some nights. It will be impossible not to look.
And that’s swelling.
But there is only one acceptable result now. When you get rid of three useful players – Caris LeVert, Jarrett Allen and Prince Taurean – and three unprotected No. 1 picks (2022, ’24, ’26) and four swaps (2021, ’23, ’25, ’27) for a 31-year-old gunner with a question mark, who desperately wanted to team up with Durant to change that perception …
Well, there is only one possible result.
Taking the Bucks to seven games in an epic Eastern final will not be enough. Did you fall to the Lakers in a memorable final? Not. The Nets are not only all-in for the next 2-3 years, but they are all for the rest of the decade. Their viability exists here and now, defined by a simple equation:
Scroll or scroll?
Not even the Yankees threw all their chips in the middle of a table like this for all their daring free agent fouls. That was just money. So was the 2010 Heat group of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, a crazy maneuver that seems strange now.
Perhaps the only other transaction belonging to the same sentence as that was the October 12, 1989 transaction that sent Herschel Walker back from Dallas to Minnesota in exchange for eight future Viking selections. The Cowboys eventually won two Super Bowls. The Vikings went 21-21 with Walker.
In addition, it will look like Brock-for-Broglio, unless the Nets win a title.
Acquiring Harden is not the extraordinary part of this; there were a lot of voices (including this one) suggesting that if the Nets wanted a penny – after they had already imported Durant and Irving – they should have a dollar, go for a break with Harden.
But at this cost?
Former Nets CEO Billy King has been ridiculed indefinitely for his business deal in 2013, which brought Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to Brooklyn and sent a series of elections to Boston – and rightly so. . Marks was hired to erase the memory of that mistake. In November, he actually said:
“I think we want to build something sustainable here. This is not a passing moment, like an all-in and in a year or two, we stand here like this: “Great, now we have to completely rebuild everything and we don’t have the assets to rebuild with. ‘So there’s that part of it. ”
Sounds good. And now he reads like a parody, like a prank, like crazy, and now it’s an amazing fact, King-Marks, that the Nets will spend 14 years – 2014 to 2027 – without once controlling their choice in the first round. Read that sentence again. Staging.
Maybe Irving’s problems increased the advantage for Marks. Perhaps the attraction of throwing the three talents together was worth noting Harden’s recent poisonous behavior, or Irving’s ongoing problems, whatever they were.
(And maybe Marks should have done what Houston did shortly after he agreed to this deal, swap LeVert with Indiana for Victor Oladipo; maybe THIS deal would have been much smarter than this, at a fraction of the cost.)
It is impossible to know.
One thing is certain:
No team in the history of the sport has ever been asked to win a championship to justify its existence. So far. Up to these nets. From now on, there is only one final result allowed: Barclays to Borough Hall, the O’Brien Trophy at hand.
Anything else will be unacceptable. No, in fact: it is more than that:
Everything else will be an abject failure.