Brooklyn’s Next Nets: Tyrese Martin

Our mini-series analyzing Brooklyn’s young players continues with Tyrese Martin, who was just signed to a standard NBA deal.

Welcome back to Brooklyn’s Next Nets, a little mini-series celebrating the arrival of the second half of the 2024-25 season. (I do hate calling it the “second half” of the season, given that the post-All-Star stretch consists of just 28 games this year, but it rolls off the tongue.)

We’re analyzing Sean Marks’ stated preseason goal of finding the “next Nets” by evaluating some of Brooklyn’s lesser heralded young-ish players. Has the front office and coaching staffs uncovered any hidden gems in the vein of, say, Joe Harris or Spencer Dinwiddie?

That remains to be seen, but Brooklyn is happy with at least one of their bargain bin finds in 2025. On Wednesday, they converted Tyrese Martin’s two-way deal into a standard, multi-year NBA contract. Exact details have not yet been released, but there could be a team option and/or partial guarantees this summer.

“Nobody deserves it more than him,” Head Coach Jordi Fernandez said. “He’s worked the whole summer. He’s about what we’re trying to build here. He helps us build the culture.”

Indeed, Martin is no free-loader. This season, he’s ninth on the team in minutes, and has already been active for 50 games, appearing in 36 games. Not coincidentally, the limit for active NBA games for a two-way in one season is 50, so Brooklyn needed to make this move for Martin to stick in the rotation.

“I mean, he’s gotta continue to do what he’s doing,” said Fernández. “That’s why he’s earned what he’s earned, we don’t need to see anything completely different. It’s just keep working, and keep working along the lines that we established with his agreement. I think that’s what we need. We need continuity.”

Well, maybe Martin doesn’t have to continue exactly what he’s doing. To be sure, he’s outperformed expectations since 2024 Las Vegas Summer League, where he played well enough to earn a two-way contract.

He’s had his moments during the regular season too, including an explosive 30-point performance to lead a short-handed Nets team over the Phoenix Suns on the road…

At around 6’5”, Martin has typical 2-guard size, so he’s gonna need to shoot the 3-ball. Despite that explosion in the desert, that doesn’t seem super likely.

After 385 long-range attempts in the G League, plus 167 over his NBA career, he’s shooting a sliver under 33% from deep, with a negligible difference between the G and NBA. That includes 33.8% on 160 attempts with Brooklyn this season, hardly a departure from the norm.

It’s odd, though. He has a bit of Tyler Johnson to him, in that his percentage feels like it should be higher; maybe that’s due to a willingness to fire off tough, movement threes, which forces defenders to close out to him more aggressively than you’d think.

Though he isn’t an explosive leaper, Martin is solid and balanced as a driver. Basketball Reference tracks him as a ridiculous 25-of-30 at the rim this season, low volume but those are not just breakaway attempts…

He’s also made some impressive passes out of these drives, though they are mostly of the regimented PnR sort, reading a drop defender or the low man in 3v2 situations. Still, not every NBA player can maker this play…

It’s a real bummer that Martin is shooting in the low-30s, percentage-wise from every other area of the court. Though he’ll likely be on the team next season, this final stretch of Martin’s season is about finding offense elsewhere on the floor, or upping that driving volume. Once again, 3-point shooting, 3-point shooting, 3-point shooting.

There is other stuff to like about Martin. Similar to Tosan Evbuomwan, who we’ve covered in this series, he’s the rare Net who is strong for his height.

He looks it, with broad shoulders, thick thighs, and the like. Statistically, Martin is an excellent positional rebounder, grabbing 15.9% of available D-boards when he;’s on the floor this season. Per Cleaning the Glass, that ranks in the 97th percentile of players they term “wings,” behind only known glass-eaters Josh Hart and John Konchar.

Unfortunately, Martin doesn’t have any twitch or noteworthy length to supplement those qualities. Though a hustler, he’s fairly invisible on defense, whether at the point-of-attack or off-ball. His treacherously low deflection, steal, and block rates match the eye-test.

So what’s Tyrese Martin’s sell as a positive NBA player?

It’s nothing too complicated. Just weeks away from his 26th birthday, he’s just a couple days younger than Marvin Bagley, for example. Physically, he is who he is.

The hope is that Martin can drag his 3-point percentage up toward 36-37% through next season, perhaps on more stand-still shots. Anything less than that at 6’5” veers toward black hole territory, which Martin occasionally compensates for with rebounding and driving…but he’s not a miracle worker.

The ex-UConn Husky is often solid for the Brooklyn Nets, a win — however insignificant in the grand scheme of things — for the scouting department. A major win for Martin would be becoming a 10th man on a playoff-caliber team.

Can he become anything more than that? If it’s gonna happen, it has to start now.