Now that the Nets’ big three era is over, and all three superstars are now playing for three different teams, Brooklyn GM Sean Marks is able to look back and acknowledge that the hyped superteam didn’t meet expectations.
In fact, it didn’t come close.
“I think it would be easy to look in from the outside, and honestly, I look at it internally and say ‘it didn't work,’” Marks said. “Let's be honest there.
We did not reach the full potential of where we thought we could get to.”
How much of that fault being attributed to Marks and the front office is a question that perhaps will never be answered, but Marks acknowledged on Thursday night that there were mistakes he and his staff made, and other events that they had no control of.
“I look back, and we’ve done a lot of thinking and soul searching on this, and we said ‘Well, we did everything we possibly could to maximize this organization’s potential, and have this team in the conversation for a championship,’” Marks said. “That’s all we’ve done. We’ve shown that we’ve built this team up twice. I don’t need to go back to what it was, but we’ve built it up twice, and have a team that we can look back and say ‘They have a chance.’ It didn’t work. Some of it was through things we could control, and some of it was through things we can’t control.”
Still regardless whether they felt blowing it up was the right move or not, trading away one of the best players in the league in Kevin Durant was not a choice that Marks enjoyed making.
“I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. It’s always difficult,” Marks said. “When you’re trading a player of that stature…it’s incredibly difficult. My job as a GM, and our job as a front office, is to try to bring in that caliber of talent. Those decisions aren’t easy…but at the same time, To be able to move Kevin to a place where he will have success and they'll enter into their championship window, and for us, to bring back these two players in that particular trade, and the draft assets, that gives us a clear pathway to continue to rebuild, and maybe not hit the reset button, because we have a group in there that’s very competitive…but this has given us a clear pathway on how to continue this.”
Follow Ryan Chichester on Twitter: @ryanchichester1
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