Summer of our lives: Inside Brooklyn Nets year in the shadows

The hysteria over draft position, the fretting over trade rumors — inside Barclays Center, the Brooklyn Nets hardly took notice.

Everybody loves winning. It’s the trying to win that hurts.

The Brooklyn Nets, in 2024-25, were wholly and undeniably freed from this burden for the first time since I was in high school. That was the Sean Kilpatrick Era of Nets basketball, and I loved those teams in absentia.

The lack of talent on those rosters, which coincided with the heyday of Bleacher Report, House of Highlights, NBA Twitter, and other since-sloppified engagement traps, turned me into a League Pass fanatic. I obsessed over professional basketball beyond Brooklyn.

Now a decade later, armed with a keyboard, a podcast, and a video series, I did not have the option of being absent, or at least half-present, as many Nets fans were this season. (We check the page-views.)

The more important difference between the Sean Kilpatrick Era and what may be henceforth known as the Drew Timme Era is that Brooklyn was not just freed from the burden of trying to win. They were saddled with expectations of losing, though not unfairly…

In a twist that would surprise fans of any other franchise, Brooklyn is all but guaranteed to hold the sixth-best NBA Draft Lottery odds, and Phoenix (whose pick now belongs to Houston) could hold the ninth-best odds. There are a number of ways the lottery could play out on May 12, and many of them would make Nets fans laugh, then sick to their stomach.

For many, May 12 represents the sum total of Brooklyn’s season. Sure, Head Coach Jordi Fernández seems like a slam-dunk hire, and sophomore Noah Clowney’s stock may have taken a hit, but this rebuild can’t climb out of the womb until General Manager Sean Marks starts to add young talent. With all due respect to Tosan Evbuomwan and Keon Johnson, the 2025 NBA Draft is his first opportunity to do that.

But the Brooklyn Nets, featuring the Evbuomwans and Johnsons of the world, are set to play their 82nd game on Sunday afternoon. Assuming that contest does not go to overtime, they’ll have played 3956 minutes of basketball between the two franchise-altering trades of last summer and the 2025 lottery. What was it actually like?

Insular.

Yes, the players are all on social media, and the more outgoing personalities like Cam Johnson broke the fourth wall, both in podcast and interview form…

In a recent practice, I asked Ziaire Williams the difference between playing on Memphis Grizzlies teams that lived and died through wins and losses and a Brooklyn Nets team that, as Fernández says, cannot measure their success in wins and losses.

“Honestly, not that much,” answered Williams. “If anything, it’s made me want to win even more, just to prove all the whoever wrong. We still approach every game — even now, there hasn’t been one game where we’ve purposely tried to lose, or a game we came in thinking we’re going to lose. You know, we want to win every game. And we’ve got a competitive group, a group that loves each other and a group that wants to win every night.”

Fair enough. Players didn’t prepare any differently, there was no less desire to win once the ball was tipped, particularly from the guys without secure NBA spots, which is to say most of this team. But everything else about this Nets season felt different

In 2024, Brooklyn got handed a 50-piece by the Boston Celtics heading into All-Star Weekend, and Jacque Vaughn was fired thereafter. Our game recap, from over a year ago, currently has 733 comments. In 2025, Brooklyn lost a game by 59 points to the Los Angeles Clippers, the largest margin of defeat in franchise history. Do you even remember it happening?

People around the Nets say a Wizards-esque season was never on the table, even after reacquiring their 2025 pick from the Houston Rockets last summer. The Wizards started this season 6-41, and even after a couple trade deadline improvements and generally respectable ball since then, they’re currently tied with the Utah Jazz for the league’s worst record.

Say what you will about Brooklyn’s decision-makers, but they are too smart to think that a starting lineup of Dennis Schröder, Cam Thomas, Cam Johnson, Dorian Finney-Smith, and Nic Claxton is sub-NBA level, particularly with a handful of useful reserves off the bench. The 9-10 start to the season that doomed Brooklyn’s tank allowed Marks to pry a couple extra second-rounders for Schröder and potentially increase Johnson’s trade value this summer, but do those means justify the ends?

Perhaps that’s the wrong question to ask. On the record, off the record, whatever, people around the Nets touted the values of culture-building this season. Why trade this vibe for a few extra ping-pong balls? I can’t vouch for the logic there, but they enjoyed watching Tyrese Martin and Day’Ron Sharpe bust their butts for extra possessions, divorced from the pressure of trying to win. People love Cam Johnson, and why wouldn’t they?

Unlike Mikal Bridges, he said nothing that could be perceived as controversial or critical of the Nets on his podcast appearances, and he was in a much tougher situation given the constant trade rumors. Johnson also elevated his game to career-best levels, and never took a possession off even when it would have been understandable.

When he told me that any fan rooting for losses was “not really a fan,” no other Net — player or otherwise — publicly affirmed those comments, but all appreciated them. Johnson may have been a little blunt, but he captured the attitude of the team in a year where many only tuned in to see them lose.

Noah Clowney, the team’s most intriguing young prospect, played just 46 games in a stop-and-start season that featured three 20-point games and four sprained ankles. Fellow sophomore Dariq Whitehead played 457 G League minutes and will finish with just north of 200 NBA minutes.

Most casual and many die-hard Nets fans switched the channel right there, content to root for losses by checking final scores at night’s end. I certainly appreciated the efforts of Trendon Watford and Reece Beekman and creative defensive game-planning from Jordi Fernández, but the Nets were likely the NBA’s least interesting team in 2024-25.

The players didn’t care one bit about that, many were there to create an NBA career from scratch. Other members of the organization — accountants notwithstanding — were probably relieved. What good has outside interest and expectations in the Brooklyn Nets brought them in the past decade?

Press conferences were increasingly sparse and casual this season. Fiery quotes like Cam Johnson’s were the exception. Instead, Fernández discussed aspects of his player-development philosophy, and players on the fringes of the NBA expressed gratitude simply to simply be there.

To those inside Barclays Center, it beat the melodrama Mikal Bridges and Spencer Dinwiddie brought to the podium last season.

Is that what Sean Marks & Co. were aiming for by refusing to tear it down to the studs immediately, by refusing to create a season full of losses like the one Brooklyn experienced on Thursday night? No. But it became a pleasant side-effect.

Those outside Barclays Center won’t care about any of that, and they shouldn’t. Wins are wins, losses are losses, draft picks are draft picks, and it’s natural to prefer the stylings of other NBA teams over Ziaire Williams’ improved 3-point shooting. In 2017, I watched far more of James Harden than Trevor Booker and Justin Hamilton.

Over the past six months, the Brooklyn Nets enjoyed their time out of the spotlight. Now begins the work of re-entering it.