ESSAY: What do we make of a Brooklyn Nets season that, above all, doesn’t make any sense?

Whether you’re enjoying the makings of a failed tank or not, we can all agree this has not been the Brooklyn Nets season we expected.

Personally, I enjoy the wins.

As you probably know, Sarah Kustok and I host The Backcourt, a Brooklyn Nets podcast that is a lot more fun to record when there are wins to talk about.

By season’s end, I’ll have attended 45 games of the 2024-25 Brooklyn Nets, talking to Jordi Fernández and some of the players after each one. This is a particularly nice, engaging group of guys, even more so after wins. On Friday, we looked at how Brooklyn’s defense has powered them to their best stretch of the season entering the All-Star break, but I also mentioned the general spirit of the team as being key.

That’s no empty cliché. The Nets have often had more fight than their opponents, more togetherness, and in the dog days of the NBA calendar, that matters. That energy, even the tiny parcels of it that fall on bystanders like me, is fun to be around.

The 20-34 Brooklyn Nets aren’t world-beaters or anything, but they’re just one loss back of the Play-In Tournament at the break. Exactly one season ago, coming off a coach-firing 50-point blowout defeat to the Boston Celtics, the Nets were two losses out of the Play-In.

Personally, I enjoy the wins. Olive: branched.

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But this doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense.

Las Vegas did not set this Brooklyn team’s over/under win total at 18.5, a decision the Nets addressed after notching their 19th win of the season on Monday evening.

“We all seen they had us projected to win 19 games,” said Day’Ron Sharpe. “We all felt the same way that Jordi felt, you know? Ourselves as a collective, we came together like, ‘we all feel that way.’”

No, they set an imagined Brooklyn team’s win total at 18.5. A Brooklyn team that would not feature Dennis Schröder, Cam Johnson, Dorian Finney-Smith, perhaps not Nic Claxton and/or Day’Ron Sharpe, and definitely not D’Angelo Russell.

The Nets, who have indeed found their head coach of the future, did not tank their tank with this recent 6-1 stretch, though it certainly slammed the door shut on top-3 draft lottery odds.

Rather, their chance at top lotto odds — which was inarguably their organizational priority to everybody in the NBA on June 25, 2024 — died many deaths this season.

Dennis Schröder and Cam Johnson shared the court in 22 games this season, of which the Nets won nine. Brooklyn actually won the minutes those two shared together. Dorian Finney-Smith had a net rating of +3.6 in his 580 minutes for Brooklyn this season.

The 2-15 stretch that Brooklyn went on in January wasn’t going to last the whole season. Tanking or not, you can only rest so many players that are truly healthy. Cam Thomas is scheduled to return after the All-Star break, and on this team so desperate for an offensive punch, he’ll only help them win.

The path is surprising, but Brooklyn winning 20 of its first 54 games is not. You know, given the path.

This was apparent from the day the Nets traded Mikal Bridges last June, not just to close observers, but the whole league!

Alas, Brooklyn is too competent on the floor to land top odds this season. They start too many real NBA players, and now have 48 minutes of solid big man play every game.

The fifth-best odds are still in play, but anywhere from 6-8 is now looking more likely. Obviously, the front office cannot hand-pick which games the team wins and loses, but generally speaking is this smart? Of course not! There is only one way the difference between the 11-seed and the 14-seed is remotely worth it, and that’s if Cam Johnson is scoring 20 points in a playoff game on his current contract.

But if that’s the plan, why did Sean Marks reacquire his own picks for the next two drafts, featuring true blue-chip prospects in Cooper Flagg and Dylan Harper this season, and AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, and Cam Boozer next season? Why? Can Brooklyn draft a stud at seven? Of course. But why not play the probabilities?! If the players Brooklyn held onto (or, in the case of D’Angelo Russell, acquired) this season were so much better than expected, the team wouldn’t be 20-34.

Agh. I can’t go over this yet again.

Whether you think this season has been enjoyable, painstaking, or a mix of both, one thing is clear: It hasn’t made any sense.

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In the front office, that is. The players have mostly been a joy to watch, and Cam Johnson’s breakout will have me and many Nets fans rooting for him in the NBA’s Three-Point Contest this Saturday.

Following Wednesday’s victory, Johnson made it clear he and the team do not care about the supposed tank…

“We don’t care. We do not care what they say about that. Listen, at the end of the day, the 15, 18 guys on his team have a job to do, and our job is to not try to get a draft pick. Our job is simply to win basketball games, the basketball games that are in front of us, and that’s what we’re going to put our full effort towards. We don’t care about all that other noise.”

Then, he dropped the hammer: “We don’t care about — if that’s what they think, then they’re not really a fan, you know what I mean? They don’t want us to succeed. You’re going to ask our own players to lose? We’re not going to do that. We’re out there to compete, to win every game. And we’re out there right now to fight back. We’ve been in a little hole, we fought back … it’s the excitement that this team gets along well and is out there fighting for each other.”

Nic Claxton was slightly more reserved in his comments. First, he said “we could care less about draft picks. We don’t care,” which, duh.

Then, he said understands where these tank-focused fans are coming from…

This is a minimal burden for the players to deal with, insofar as it can be called a burden. I can report that court-side fans are not shouting at the team to miss shots and turn the ball over, whatever tweets the players may catch here and there.

Jordi Fernández and his coaching staff, who also deserve credit for the better-than-expected record, are receiving rave reviews from the team, putting the guys in positions to succeed. Though a 20-34 record is nothing to write home about on its face, it’s hard to argue any Brooklyn Net has cost themselves money this season.

So what now?

Well, this franchise has never drafted a true homegrown star. Kenny Anderson, Derrick Coleman, Brook Lopez, and Kenyon Martin each made one All-Star game with the Nets, the team that drafted them. Not to take anything away from those players, but Brooklyn’s two chances to rewrite history over the next two seasons (yes, with plenty of cap space and trade ammo to boot) seem to be fading.

Sliding toward the middle of the lottery in 2025 is one thing, but if Sean Marks is truly insistent on hoarding cap space this summer rather than prioritizing draft position, what does it say about Brooklyn’s potential pick in 2026?

To answer all these questions, and the title of the article: I’m tired. I can’t make heads or tails of the season. The only thing that makes sense about the Nets at the 2025 All-Star break is that they are confounding, right in line with the rest of Nets history.

After all, it is nothing if not odd to hear YES Network’s Richard Jefferson openly vouch for Brooklyn to focus on draft position, which he did during the team’s February 7 win over the Miami Heat.

All we can do is enjoy this. Both the general absurdity of this season and the wins themselves, which I again admit is easier for me to do.

Rooting for losses at this stage just seems painful, given that you’re dealing with a competent, talented-enough team with a promising head coach. Life would all be better if we were like this Nets fan, iceteawithlemon, who just made this site’s first Fanpost in over a year, confused about why the team is winning so many games in a supposed tank year.

Here’s a screenshot…

Oh, iceteawithlemon, how right you are.

12 hours after this Fanpost, the Philadelphia 76ers benched Tyrese Maxey at the last minute (though sources did say he was truly hurt), and the Nets defeated the Sixers, tying them in the standings and inching oh-so-close to the Play-In Tournament.

Though I personally enjoyed the win for all the reasons listed above, it was another tiny stab at the corpse of Brooklyn’s tank. Now, with a week off and 28 games of this unsolvable puzzle still to come, I wish I was more like iceteawithlemon, who made it all the way to the All-Star break before stumbling into this burning building.

Welcome to the club.