It’s a pretty straightforward comparison for the Nets now. There is only one end result that can possibly justify what they did on Wednesday afternoon.
They must win an NBA championship.
They must keep a parade route that begins at Barclays Center, where Atlantic meets Flatbush, and ends with a gathering in Boro Hall’s wide plaza bathed in ticker tape, with the Brooklyn Bridge proudly overseeing the entire party not far from the Dodgers’ old headquarters on Montague Street.
Otherwise, the deal Sean Marks struck Wednesday is going to be the most ridiculous trade in the history of the sport. Marks brings James Harden to Brooklyn, along with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, whenever Irving decides to return to work.
That will be a dazzling basketball on many evenings. Already a dynamic carnival offensive act, The Nets can score 150 points some nights. Already a lamentable defensive team, the Nets can allow 150 points on some nights. It will be impossible not to look.
And that’s great.
But there is now only one acceptable result. When you rid yourself of three useful players – Caris LeVert, Jarrett Allen and Taurean Prince – and three unprotected No. 1 picks (2022, ’24, ’26) and four exchanges (2021, ’23, ’25, ’27) for a 31-year-old shooter with a question mark playoff past who was desperate to team up with Durant to change that perception …
Well, there is only one possible outcome.
Taking the money to seven games in an epic oriental final isn’t enough. Fall to the Lakers in a memorable finale? No. Not only are the Nets all-in for the next 2-3 years, they’re all-in for the rest of the decade. Their viability exists in the here and now, defined by a simple equation:
Parade or no parade?
Even the Yankees haven’t thrown all of their chips in the middle of a table like this, despite all their daring free-agent debauchery. That was just money. So did the 2010 Heat group of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, a brash maneuver that now seems strange.
Perhaps the only other transaction that belongs in the same sentence was the October 12, 1989 trade that sent Herschel Walker back from Dallas to Minnesota in exchange for eight future Vikings draft picks. The Cowboys went on to win two Super Bowls. The Vikings went 21-21 with Walker.
Besides that, that looks like Brock-for-Broglio unless the Nets win a title.
Acquiring Harden isn’t the bizarre part of this; There have been plenty of voices (including this one) who have suggested that if the Nets got a dime – after already importing Durant and Irving – they should get a dollar, go broke with Harden.
But at this price?
Former Nets GM Billy King has been endlessly derided for the deal he struck in 2013 that brought Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to Brooklyn and sent a bunch of picks to Boston – and with good reason. Marks was hired to erase the memory of that mistake. In November he actually said this:
“I think we want to build something sustainable here. This isn’t something that is a fleeting moment like going all in and in a year or two we will be here like, ‘Great, now we have to rebuild everything from scratch and we don’t have the resources to rebuild with. So there’s that side of it. “
Sounded good. And now it reads like parody, like farce, like folly, and now it’s an amazing joint King-Marks fact that the Nets will last 14 years – 2014 through 2027 – without ever mastering their first round pick. Read that sentence again. Astonishing.
Perhaps Irving’s troubles upped the ante for Marks. Perhaps the temptation to throw those three talents together was worth it to overlook Harden’s recent behavior, which had been toxic, or Irving’s ongoing troubles, whatever they turned out to be.
(And maybe Marks should have just done what Houston did shortly after agreeing to this deal, swapping LeVert to Indiana for Victor Oladipo; maybe THAT deal would have been a lot smarter than this one, at a fraction of the cost.)
It is impossible to know.
Only one thing is certain:
No team in the history of the sport is ever required to win a championship to justify their existence. Until now. To these nets. From this point on, there is only one permissible end result: Barclays to Borough Hall, the O’Brien Trophy in tow.
Everything else will be unacceptable. No, actually: it’s more than that:
Everything else will be a big failure.