The 2023-24 season is one Detroit Pistons fans would like to have wiped from their memory, as the team won a franchise-low 14 games and suffered through the longest single-season losing streak in NBA history. But this year’s Nets could be worse.
Brooklyn is clearly committed to rebuilding after selecting a record five players in the first round of the 2025 Draft and they will be one of the youngest teams in the league next year.
This is a team fresh off winning 26 games last season and now they are even younger. They swapped out Cam Johnson for Michael Porter Jr. (probably a wash) and have future unrestricted free agent Cam Thomas on a qualifying offer that is going to have him gunning exclusively for his own stats, with no regard for wins.
Brooklyn could be starting a rookie point guard, which is always a recipe for disaster, and we could see them trade the few veterans they have at this year’s deadline to ensure they have one of the league’s worst records.
The Pistons team that only won 14 games had more talent than this current group of Nets, who arguably only have one player (Porter Jr.) in their starting five who should be an NBA starter.
But the Detroit disaster had one thing going for it that could keep the Nets from taking their spot on the list of the NBA’s worst all-time teams.
The Brooklyn Nets have a better coach than the Pistons did
Jordi Fernandez is only 26-56 in his career and still has plenty to prove as a coach, but he had his guys at least playing hard last year and you could argue that the 26 wins they banked were actually more than they should have won.
The same couldn’t be said of Monty Williams, conductor of the Pistons’ biggest trainwreck, who pushed all of the wrong buttons in Detroit, including starting Killian Hayes over Jaden Ivey.
Yes, he had a young team, but it wasn’t much younger than the one JB Bickerstaff just took to the playoffs and had most of the same guys. While Trajan Langdon did a far better job of building his roster, it shouldn’t have been the difference between 14 and 44 wins.
The Nets will be bad next season, but they won’t be as poorly coached as those 14-win Pistons were, so I doubt we see Brooklyn break their losing streak, though they may come up shy of 14 wins depending on how many players they deal.