The Brooklyn Nets have made various moves over the course of this offseason as they seek to have a 2025-26 NBA season that they can be proud of. Brooklyn has not made the transactions needed to help the team compete for a playoff spot and as a result, they are considered to be one of the worst teams in the Eastern Conference heading into next season.

“And then there’s the Nets and Wizards, for whom there is no ambiguity,” Tim Bontemps wrote for ESPN as the outlet ranked all 15 teams in the Eastern Conference and put those teams into specific tiers. The Nets, for example, were placed in the “bottom five” tier, meaning that they are projected to be one of the bottom-feeding teams in an conference that is more wide-open than usual.

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“These two teams will be hoping to land in the top four of the 2026 NBA draft, which portends to have a stacked group of prospects,” Bontemps continued while talking about Brooklyn and Washington in the same vein. “This season, they will be playing tons of young players, making trades for future assets and focusing on hopefully a different outcome in the lottery next May.”

To Bontemps’ point, Nets general manager Sean Marks and the rest of the front office have to be hoping that Brooklyn is bad enough to get a top-five pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. Some of the players that the Nets could have a chance of drafting would be Kansas guard Darryn Peterson, BYU forward AJ Dybantsa, and Duke forward Cameron Boozer, just to name a few.

Due to how well Brooklyn played to start the 2024-25 campaign, they essentially played themselves out of a top-five pick as they finished with the sixth-worst record in the league, forcing them to get the eighth overall pick. As of this moment, the Nets have not yet found the player that is considered to be their franchise player and if they don’t progress through the 2025-26 season in the right way, they could once again miss out on getting their guy.

This article originally appeared on Nets Wire: ESPN projects Nets to be bottom five in NBA’s Eastern Conference