The Brooklyn Nets have their final preseason game of the 2025-26 slate on Friday when they travel across the Canadian border to face the Toronto Raptors at ScotiaBank Arena. Throughout the course of training camp and the preseason, Brooklyn has had to evaluate every player on the roster with cuts in mind and one of their recent first-round picks is trying to continue his career with another team.
HoopsHype’s Michael Scotto reported on Friday that guard Dariq Whitehead, the 22nd overall pick in the 2023 NBA Draft, has signed with the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Nets waived Whitehead on Monday as the team works its way to 18 players on the roster (15 standard, 3 Two-Ways) and the Newark, New Jersey native did not fit the bill for what Brooklyn was looking for moving forward.
The Nets waiving Whitehead made sense given that the team brought in five first-round rookies from the 2025 NBA Draft, meaning that less spots would be available for those who couldn’t help the organization right away. In Brooklyn’s 111-109 preseason win over the Phoenix Suns on Sunday in Macao, China, Whitehead played just six minutes in the contest, implying that his spot on the team was hanging on by a thread, so to speak.
Whitehead, 21, has had a couple of rough seasons in the NBA to this point as he has mostly dealt with injuries that have gotten in the way of him developing into the NBA player that he’s capable of being. During the 2024-25 campaign, Whitehead played in 20 games, but he averaged just 5.7 points and 1.5 rebounds per game while shooting 40.6% from the field and 44.6% from three-point land.
Be that as it may, Whitehead finds himself on a Thunder team that is coming off winning the NBA championship for the 2024-25 season and Oklahoma City has a great track record when it comes to player development. Whitehead most likely won’t be a major factor in the Thunder’s rotation, but if he is able to realize his potential while in Oklahoma City, he could revive his career before he finds himself out of the league.