The Nets are just biding time.
Another wasted season will be in the books after Wednesday's meaningless affair in Boston.
If you're counting, we're now through three years of meaningless games and, unfortunately, I only see more clock-watching on the horizon.
While the Nets would like you to focus on the season-to-season improvement from the 20-62 debacle of 2016-17 to 28 wins this season, the reality of their situation is still quite bleak.
Forget this recent stretch of decent play, with five wins in their last seven games after Monday's 114-105 victory over the blatantly tanking Bulls on Fan Appreciation Night at the Barclays Center. They had a similar run to conclude last season, and there certainly wasn't any carryover effect.
Some would like to pin this season on injuries -- point guards Jeremy Lin and D'Angelo Russell missed 81 and 34 games, respectively, due to knee woes. I'm sorry, but the injury bug is a league-wide epidemic. Other teams have had to overcome absences of players far superior to Lin and Russell.
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As I've noted since the preseason, the proximate cause of this disappointing campaign was an unbalanced roster with an enormous talent discrepancy compared to even the middle-of-the-pack teams.
And I don't see the talent gap closing in a material way any time soon.
Brooklyn general manager Sean Marks will again go into an offseason without the Nets' first-round draft pick (Brooklyn will get Toronto's selection, currently 29th overall, from the DeMarre Carroll trade last summer). If he wants to reprise his restricted-free-agent offer-sheet strategy, he will have to offload some salaries to get the necessary cap space. Brooklyn projects to start the summer with about $16 million in cap space -- if they renounce all four of their own free agents, including rising wing Joe Harris.
The Nets are young, with eight of their 15 rostered players under 26 (Allen Crabbe poured in a career-high 41 points on his 26th birthday Monday), so it is reasonable to expect some internal improvements. The 22-year-old Russell, who was obtained last summer in Marks' signature trade that sent center Brook Lopez and a late first-rounder to the Lakers, has some elite tools but, as I noted in my previous post, his flaws might be too ingrained to wash away in one offseason.
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Marks' overall record in his two-plus seasons on the job sparked a Twitter war last week between the New York Post's Nets beat writer Brian Lewis and Daily News Knicks reporter Stefan Bond. I leaned toward Bondy's argument -- if he would have issued a disclaimer.
Bondy correctly asserted that some media members are too quick to heap praise on Marks when it's not all that difficult to construct a 28-win team. However, Bondy should have noted that there were no moves Marks could have made that would have vaulted the Nets into relevancy.
Marks inherited a disaster, a franchise bereft of assets. No first-round picks until 2019. A lousy roster of players with limited trade value. The top unrestricted free agents wanted no part of a losing environment.
So Marks prioritized off-the-court improvements. The Nets' "development culture" supervised by coach Kenny Atkinson is the real deal. Atkinson has gotten his guys to play hard most nights, no easy task given the frustrations of losing. The Nets played 50 games that were within a five-point margin with less than five minutes remaining, the second-most in the league.
Equally impressive was that Atkinson got the most out of so many of his players. Look at the numbers -- core guys from Crabbe to Harris to Rondae Hollis-Jefferson to Spencer Dinwiddie had career years. Guard Caris LeVert and center Jarrett Allen, first-round picks Marks acquired in trades the last two offseasons, showed enough to make us believe they could have significant upside. Even veterans such as Carroll, Quincy Acy and Dante Cunningham played at or above expectations.
Yet the Nets are still just 28-53, tied for the eighth-worst mark in a league that is rife with teams losing on purpose.
(Side note: It's time for the league to simplify its lottery rules. Fourteen nonplayoff teams, 14 pingpong balls. Blame analytics. It used to be that organizations would tank for that one potential transformational player at the very top of the draft. Now you have teams like the ninth-worst Knicks and the seventh-worst Bulls doing all they can within the rules to move down the standings one or two slots. ''Tis better to be as bad as possible, the numbers say. Never mind that it took the Sixers five years of utter embarrassment, plus some good fortune, to get to this point of legitimate contention. Or that annual tanking hasn't gone so well for teams like the Suns and Kings. The lottery odds changes set to take effect in 2019 wouldn't have curtailed the Bulls from benching their best players down by just four points with 4:14 remaining Monday.)
Marks previously stated that the Nets won't join the tankers next season, after which they'll finally get to select from their own slot for the first time since 2013. It just might look that way. You couldn't tell from their play these last three seasons that they weren't tanking, either.
We can't say we weren't warned by Marks to be patient, that progress would be measured in small increments. Like we are actually watching grass grow.
For a FAN's perspective of the Nets, Devils and Jets, follow Steve on Twitter @SteveLichtenst1.
