The Brooklyn Nets have begun the process of entering into a full rebuild as they traded Mikal Bridges on Tuesday to the New York Knicks in exchange for draft picks and forward Bojan Bogdanovic. Despite that trade very much setting up Brooklyn for the next few years, their job is not done.
Per Michael Scotto of HoopsHype, the Nets could be looking ahead to the 2024 NBA Draft, the first round of which begins on Wednesday at Barclays Center, the home arena for Brooklyn and the WNBA’s New York Liberty. There has been recent reporting that the Nets had been interested in trying to acquire a first-round pick outside of the lottery and they seem confident in being able to pull that off.
“Looking ahead to the NBA Draft, Brooklyn believes it could get into the 20s if a player the Nets like fell into that range, league sources told HoopsHype,” Scotto wrote. “One player who could be dangled to a playoff-caliber team for such a pick could be (Dorian) Finney-Smith, who has a $15.38 million player option for the 2025-26 season.”
With the Draft beginning in just mere hours after the writing of this article, it’s hard to know at this time who the Nets would be interested in given that most, if not all, of the players that they had pre-draft workouts with are either second-round picks or not expected to be drafted.
The one thing that Brooklyn was unable to do, assuming they were looking to do so, was get a pick in the 2024 Draft. While setting themselves up for multiple bites at the Draft apple over the next few years seemed like the most important task for general manager Sean Marks and governor Joe Tsai, taking a player in this Draft could be something like icing on the cake of big moves that they have made prior to the Draft.
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