The Brooklyn Nets are at an interesting place within the NBA hierarchy as they are not bad enough to be a team in position to draft a potential superstar, but also aren’t good enough to be considered to be competing for a championship anytime soon. That could mean that the Nets could choose to get even younger at this season’s trade deadline.
Michael Scotto of HoopsHype recently published an article detailing the top trade candidates for every team in the league based on conversations between HoopsHype and 15 NBA executives and sources. For the Nets, the top trade candidates are Spencer Dinwiddie, Royce O’Neale, and Dorian Finney-Smith.
This does not come as much of a surprise as all three are 30 years old and are three years older than the next-oldest player on the team in Mikal Bridges, who is 27. Some Nets fans might be surprised to see these three regarded as trade candidates given how well each of them have played this season for a Brooklyn team looking to make it to the postseason.
Per Scotto, Dinwiddie is one of the players on the Nets to keep an eye on due to his ability to help plenty of teams around the league who are in a better position to compete for a championship than Brooklyn is right now. It seems that Dinwiddie has understood for awhile that him being traded was a strong possibility as he has constantly referenced throughout the season that the Nets’ core for the future is Bridges, Cam Johnson, Ben Simmons, and Nic Claxton.
Dinwiddie even went so far as to say this while on the HoopsHype podcast:
“I’ll be a free agent at the end of the year. I earned my pension already, so it is what it is. We’ll see what happens after that. If the team wins and we’ve got guys rolling, at the bare minimum, I’ve left the team in good hands, and if it’s time for me to ride off into the sunset, that’s what it is, and I’ll be a Brooklyn Nets fan.”
Scotto also noted in his piece that league executives are monitoring the statuses of Finney-Smith and O’Neale. Finney-Smith has drawn interest from several playoff-caliber teams and he is tailor-made to help a team looking for a wing who can shoot the three and play effective defense. Scotto says that league executives are expecting the Nets to want the value of two first-round picks for trading Finney-Smith.
For O’Neale, some executives, according to HoopsHype, believe that Brooklyn will want a first-round pick in value in return for any trade of O’Neale. O’Neale will be an unrestricted free-agent after this season.
It will be interesting to see what the Nets do as they are currently in the running for the play-in tournament if the season ended today.
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