The Brooklyn Nets doubled down on their rebuild by breaking an NBA-record of taking five players in the first round of the 2025 NBA Draft to be the future. While Brooklyn is not that far removed from being a playoff contender, they will have to build themselves from the ground up, but it seems that some are not enthused with what the Nets did this summer.
“The Nets had the league’s most cap space this summer and five first-round picks in the draft. With all of that flexibility, they managed to add…well, very little,” Bleacher Report’s Zach Buckley wrote when discussing Brooklyn’s offseason. B/R gave the Nets a D+ for their offseason thus far and while that doesn’t yet include re-signing guard Cam Thomas, the outlet seems to have issues with more than the Draft.
“Maybe the front office will claim to be huge fans of Michael Porter Jr. and Terance Mann, but those players are only in Brooklyn because their last employers attached first-round picks to send them there,” Buckley continued. “Porter is talented but overpaid, while Mann appears somewhere between plateauing and regressing.”
When it comes to the Nets heading into this summer, it is true that Brooklyn had the most cap space in the league by far, but it’s hard to know what adding to the roster in a meaningful way looks like. For example, the Nets have not spent money on any big-name free-agents as of this writing, but they have used some of their cap space to take on players like Porter and Mann, two players who should be able to make an impact next season.
Porter is coming off one of the best seasons of his career in the 2024-25 season as he averaged 18.2 points, 7.0 rebounds, and 2.1 assists per game while shooting 50.4% from the field and 39.5% from three-point land for the Denver Nuggets. Mann split last season between the Los Angeles Clippers and the Atlanta Hawks, but he averaged 7.7 points, 3.0 rebounds, 1.8 assists per game while shooting 49.6% from the floor and 36.8% from deep.
The Nets did not do much to improve the team in the short-term as Porter was the best player they added this offseason and that was at the expense of forward Cam Johnson. However, Brooklyn has at least 12 first-round picks between 2026 and 2032 and they also drafted guard Egor Demin with the eighth overall pick in the 2025 Draft with the hope that he can be the point guard of the future.