ANALYSIS: Six years in, Nic Claxton is at toughest point in his Brooklyn journey. He wants to be better.

Nic Claxton’s rollercoaster career as a Brooklyn Net has taken him and us to a bewildering place.

It is has not been easy to watch Nic Claxton play basketball for the Brooklyn Nets this season. Now nearing the halfway point of his sixth NBA season, such a sentence was previously unthinkable for the #31 pick in 2019.

Claxton was not the biggest acquisition Brooklyn made in June, as you’ll recall. And he only played 47 NBA games over his first two professional seasons, missing the rest due to G League assignments or injury. Didn’t matter.

His debut and subsequent appearances with Brooklyn (and Long Island) came early in that hospital waiting room of a 2019-20 season; it injected life into the fanbase, into the team, into nerds like me yearning for more player development. Who was this second-round pick? Who was this gangly, dyed-hair 20-year-old grabbing offensive rebounds and imprisoning CJ McCollum on switches?

Claxton’s postgame interview from his NBA debut — a ridiculous 119-115 win over the Portland Trail Blazers in which Damian Lillard scored 60 — is two minutes of smiling joy…

“I’m just doing what I do. It’s basketball, so I’m just out there hooping, having fun.”

Over the next few seasons, “Nicolas” became “Nic”, his hairstyles changed by the day, and dipped his toes into the world of fashion. The native South Carolinian had moved to Brooklyn and embraced it; he would spend the entirety of his early-20s here.

Again, as you’ll recall, the Brooklyn Nets produced a lot of other attention-grabbing headlines during this time. Not the local nor national media paid much mind to The Side-Quests of Nic Claxton.

But in just four seasons (the length of Claxton’s rookie contract had he been drafted one spot earlier), he had become one of the league’s best and most promising young centers. In his age-23 season, Clax led the league in field-goal percentage, doing far more than just finishing hand-outs…

At the same time, had he become the best perimeter defender of any center in the NBA? That was debatable, but nobody he could deny that he was on that short-list, or deny that he was also blocking over two shots a game.

Due to his frame, Claxton would never be an all-out anchor capable of dragging teams to league-best defense by simply existing around the paint. But he didn’t have to be. The versatility, the playmaking on both ends driven by his ability to cover the whole court with a leap and a stretch, he was as impactful as he was fun. Tracking his step-by-step progress only made it more rewarding, especially amid the frequent aggravation and disappointment elsewhere in Nets World.

It’d be nice to pretend the story ended there, or when Nic Claxton signed a four-year, $100 million contract with the Nets in the 2024 offseason.

Even though it followed an age-24 season that didn’t compare to his breakout, there were built-in rationales … or excuses: His team was miserable as the losses piled up. Head Coach Jacque Vaughn seemingly lost the locker room, then his job. Claxton’s engagement came and went during the 2023-24 season, but it wasn’t as egregious as some of his teammates.

He didn’t utter a word about starting games next to the far less productive Ben Simmons, whose total lack of an offensive game hindered Claxton’s own in a contract year. He didn’t utter a word about Vaughn’s reluctance to switch him out on the perimeter, again, in a contract year.

The talent still flashed. A dominant performance against Chet Holmgren here, bullying Victor Wembanyama and Jaren Jackson Jr. there. Nic Claxton was still Nic Claxton.

I think he still is. I hope he still is. But his best is receding further beneath the surface. In 2024-25, he’s playing not just a bad Nets team, but one without meaning, in lineups full of random two-way players, trade assets, and those in between.

Claxton’s smiles have been replaced by flagrant fouls and ejections. When he does play a full game, he doesn’t make those winning plays of old. He doesn’t make those exciting plays of old…

Though he dealt with a back injury early in the season, he appears physically healthier. He’s back to touching the top of the square when throwing down alley-oops. There are nights (read: anytime he plays the Milwaukee Bucks) that the Claxton of yesterday shows up, but those nights are fewer and farther between than ever.

This is ever the cliché, but it’s unavoidable: He’s just not locked in.

Put aside the ejections and technicals, or even the plays Nic is slow to get back on defense. Even then, he takes jumpers seemingly at random. In Monday’s loss to the Indiana Pacers, Clax opened the second half with two misses. Neither came at the expiration of the shot-clock, he took ‘em … just cause. His coast-to-coast takes feel like premeditated decisions to be aggressive, rather than a byproduct of reading the game. Okay, let me get a shot up.

Of course, there’s strict basketball reasons Clax has been underwhelming. Brooklyn entered this season looking to find out if their $100 million man could process the floor quickly enough to make short-roll reads and be that “hub” type of offensive player. The results haven’t been great; Claxton’s passing reads in a crowded floor are often a step slow.

That’s forgivable. Unfortunate, but forgivable. Less so are plays like these, where the franchise-center forgets how Brooklyn wants to guard Victor Wembanyama just a minute into the game…

Did Nic Claxton really peak at age 23? That seems preposterous, but he’s never had that much margin for error; he’s a skinny center who doesn’t shoot the ball from outside. More than the superb drives or dunks or switching on Luka Dončić, it’s the little plays that add up to define his impact. When a matchup like the physical Goga Bitadze brings it, there’s nowhere to hide.

Making 25 millions a year, Clax won’t earn a ton of sympathy. He’s on a bad team, oh well. “That’s what the money is for!” said Mad Man Don Draper.

He’s still Nic, though. After shooting 2-of-10 — which seems impossible — on Monday, Brian Lewis of the New York Post and I spoke to him in hushed tones in the Nets locker room.

On Tuesday, Lewis wrote about the Nets vis-a-vis three teams who just went through shorter rebuilds: the OKC Thunder, Orlando Magic, and Houston Rockets. Each situation is different, but Lewis’ opening point stands: “In the NBA, things don’t change quickly. They change at warp-speed.”

Talking about that with Nic is an awkward dance. The Nets are intentionally fielding a team built to lose, and have gotten worse since the start of the season. Nic isn’t playing anywhere close to his standards, but it’s tough on him to be whipped from a playoff team to a rebuilding team as he enters his prime. There are no excuses, but there are reasons.

He can only address he and his organization’s fall from grace so directly, but he tries: “Yeah, we’ll get back to that point. I don’t like to think back about the past. You know, you build from it, you learn from it, but we just want to be in the present and just keep growing with the group that we have now.”

But Nic, you’re not one of these young guys anymore, long-term growth. The death-march of time continues … you’re in your sixth year!

“If I keep thinking about that, then I won’t be able to — like I said — be present with what’s going on now.”

Well, staying present (given the team’s record, and your subpar play) must be hard, no?

“It’s easier said than done. It’s easier said than done, but it’s a part of the business. It’s a part of the business. Like, I’m where I am now. I’m here for a reason, so I can’t just be thinking about what was and what could it be. I just gotta — see how [Lewis] said, like Orlando and Houston? They are like, contending teams now. That’s how we’ll be in a year or two, for sure.”

What’s your role in that process, considering you’re now the vet?

“Yeah. Just trying to keep our morale up, keep my morale up, and try to be as vocal as I can be.

Then, Clax finally let a smirk loose and reminded us of his youth: “Being a quote-unquote vet.”

There is no extra-digging to be done here. His self-analysis well follows Occam’s razor: Nic Claxton is having a tough time staying engaged on this transitional version of the Brooklyn Nets, and though he strives to be a strong presence in the locker room, he knows he’s not living up to the task. He mentions morale and team-spirit at almost every turn, aware those have not been his best attributes this season…

Claxton is not conscripted into taking accountability. He’s been as up front and honest as he can be about the situation, never pointing the finger anywhere but himself.

Following his performance against Indiana, he played a strong game against Detroit, putting up 14/6/3/1/3, coming out of the gates strong before the Pistons ultimately out-talented the Nets.

Still, it might be time to gently, gently ponder if a breakup would be best for both sides.

For every word written above, and more, this is not a Spencer Dinwiddie situation. Claxton’s name hasn’t come up in trade rumors despite Brooklyn’s selling intentions, a likely indicator of where the relationship is right now. There’s no way of predicting that the Nets will stink for the rest of Claxton’s contract, which runs through the 2027-28 seasons. If anything, Brooklyn has signaled they want to compete by then.

But the NBA doesn’t run on hypotheticals. If there’s a first-round pick on the table for Nic at this year’s deadline — far from a guarantee — Sean Marks has to at least lean back and stroke his chin.

We don’t have to make excuses for Nic Claxton, and he doesn’t make excuses for himself.

He’s probably not washed up at age 25. If the Nets were to trade him — which feels quite unlikely — it seems inevitable that he’d ball out for his new team. But margins are thin. There’s no guarantee Clax will be great at 27. Trends are trends, no matter the extenuating circumstances, and this two-season dip in production is more than a blip…

This all feels wrong. Nic Claxton is one of the franchise’s greatest scouting and player development stories, given his selection at #31 overall.When B.J. Johnson was promoted to assistant GM, his advocacy for Clax in the 2019 Draft was duly noted. The Nets are proud of his and their success. If the Brooklyn Nets could close their eyes, bite down, and fast-forward two years, they might wake up to an awe-inspiring offensive talent running the show at Barclays Center.

He could be throwing lobs to a spry, engaged Nic Claxton, dunking on everyone en route to an All-Star snub. It’s so easy to imagine him as the leading big man on a great team, because it’s not imagination. We’ve seen it before.

But for the past two seasons, we’ve seen something different. It hurts. There’s easy cope on hand. Look at all the moving pieces, the guard play, the losing that surrounds him. Obviously this is not the Nic Claxton we know and love.

It’s harder to ask the tough question: What if it is?