Brooklyn Nets rookies compared to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams by NBA coach

Brooklyn Nets coach compares rookies to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams

Nets Assistant Coach Steve Hetzel was questioned on his team’s strategy of bringing in multiple ball-dominant players in the same draft class.

When asked whether the Brooklyn ball-handlers can co-exist long term, Hetzel said, “This is the way our roster is constructed. The league is now multiple ball-handlers, multiple attackers.”

Hetzel continued, “If you look at the team that just won the championship, they’ve got Jalen Williams and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who can both put the ball in the paint. We feel like the more people that we can have attacking and making plays, the better we are.”

It’s a difficult comparison to sell. Yes, the best NBA teams have multiple stars who can attack and make plays. Beyond the Thunder, you have Jayson Tatum and Jalen Brown of the Boston Celtics, and LeBron James and Luka Doncic on the Los Angeles Lakers.

However, the Lakers lost to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round of the playoffs, in part due to their lack of balance. No amount of playmaking talent is going to get you far.

The Thunder have a balanced mixture of Chet Holmgren’s rim protection and rebounding and Lu Dort’s perimeter defence and shooting to pair with their playmaking.

If the answer to success was as simple as bringing in as many ball handlers as possible, they would have been the only players drafted.

Bill Simmons said what the Brooklyn Nets did in the offseason was ‘really stupid’

In a recent episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, Bill Simmons broke down the bleakest situations in the NBA. He had the Nets in the second-worst spot in the Eastern Conference.

Brooklyn entered the summer with around $55 million in cap space. They were therefore in the mix for some big-name free agents. Instead, the Nets traded for an injured Michael Porter Jr. for Cam Johnson, off the back of a successful season, and they traded for Terrance Mann.

Pair those new players with five first round rookies, and it’s going to be a long season in Brooklyn.

Simmons said, “I don’t really love a single young guy on this team. I don’t even know if you asked me who my favourite Net is what my answer would be. I guess Nick Claxton?

“Who would you have as the best Nets asset? Who are you driving home about thinking, ‘that’s our guy’?”

He went on, “At some point, I’d rather have a combination of young building blocks or good cap space. They’re in no-man’s-land.

“I don’t understand what they did with all the cap space, where they basically turned all of their cap space into Terrance Mann. it was really stupid, and they lost Cam Johnson somehow.”

The Nets better hope that Hetzel is right, and having multiple rookie playmakers on the team will be a trend-setting move. Otherwise, this could get really messy, quickly.