The Nets entered the 2025 offseason in possession of five first-round picks and the most cap room in the NBA. Brooklyn surprised many people around the league by setting a record and actually making all five selections, taking Egor Demin (No. 8), Nolan Traore (No. 19), Drake Powell (No. 22), Ben Saraf (No. 26) and Danny Wolf (No. 27), rather than packaging some of the picks to try to move up or exchanging a few for future first-rounders.
The majority -- if not all -- of those first-rounders the Nets added in last year's draft were viewed as long-term projects rather than players who could contribute to winning immediately, reinforcing the perception that Brooklyn was more focused on the future than the present. The team also made a significant trade last summer, sending Cameron Johnson to Denver for Michael Porter Jr. and an unprotected 2032 first-round pick.
The Nuggets paid a steep price in that deal, which gave them the financial flexibility to add Jonas Valanciunas, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Bruce Brown last summer to bolster a thin bench. They entered the 2026 playoffs as the No. 3 seed and had home-court advantage over No. 6 Minnesota but were upset in the first round.
Denver's early ouster was theoretically a boon for Brooklyn -- if the Nuggets get more aggressive in pursuing win-now players around Nikola Jokic, the value of that 2032 first-round pick could increase, depending on how the draft lottery (assuming it still exists) works by that point.
Porter was a good on-court fit for the Nets, who surprisingly went 7-4 in December with the top-ranked defense in the league during that month following a 3-16 start to the season. That led to some rumblings that maybe Brooklyn wouldn't be able to land a top pick in a loaded draft that owner Joe Tsai made it clear the team was focused on before 2025/26 began.
While the Nets will undoubtedly point to their December success as a reason for optimism going forward, the rest of the season made it seem more like a mirage than anything that could carry over to 2026/27. The team went 3-17 from January 1 through the February 5 trade deadline and then 7-25 from the deadline through the end of the season, finishing with the second-worst record in the league at 20-62.
Brooklyn's poor overall performance meant the team entered the draft lottery with a 52.1% chance at staying in the top four but 47.9% odds of falling to either No. 5 or No. 6, with the latter being the most likely (26.0%) individual outcome. Much to the Nets' chagrin, they were leapfrogged by multiple teams in the lottery for the second straight year, falling from No. 2 in the pre-lottery order to No. 6 in the draft.
Rather using their excess cap room last offseason or at the deadline, the Nets largely carried it over to 2026, which means they once again project to have the financial flexibility to go in a number of different directions this summer. They also don't control their 2027 first-round pick (Houston has swap rights), though the reported terms of "3-2-1" lottery reform proposal could actually incentivize the Nets to tank again, since finishing in the bottom three would reduce the Rockets' odds of landing a top pick.
The Nets' Offseason Plans
Sean Marks went from never making a lottery pick in his career as the Nets' general manager to having two in a row after the team pivoted to a rebuild following the trades of James Harden, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant in 2022 and 2023. The problem is that all the losing over the past couple years has only resulted in the eighth and sixth selections. Although that's not an unusual outcome based on the way the current lottery system works, it's a disappointing one for Brooklyn.
