It may not have seemed so in the early hours of February 9, 2023, but the Nets’ trade of Kevin Durant in February 2023 is increasingly seen by many as a big positive for the Brooklyn franchise. Sean Marks & co. ultimately wound up with 11 first round picks and swaps when all the by-products of the deal are accounted for. It is indeed the foundation stone of their current rebuild.
Of course, the trade dashed all hopes that the “Clean Sweep” and “Big Three” era would lead to a title. Now though, in some quarters particularly at the HSS Training Center, it’s seen as a sunk cost, not something to dwell on. But even outside those halls and behind the Great Window, there’s a new take. It may not be unanimous and Marks’ position with the fanbase remains tenuous, but it’s there.
Call it revisionist history or worthy counter-narrative, but in recent weeks, we’ve started to see a new appraisal of Marks tenure, nowhere more effusively than on a little noticed discussion last week between the two hosts of the “Third Apron” podcast co-hosted by Sam Quinn of CBS Sports and Yossi Gozlan on his “Third Apron” podcast. The two are known for their attention to detail and insight.
In that discussion, Quinn not only called the Durant trade a “historically great trade” in NBA annals and “the home run of home runs,” but he and Gozlan said it was the first of several deals in which Marks secured a much better deal that he had initially been offered, whether for Mikal Bridges or Cam Johnson, whose trades Quinn described as “awesome” and “killer”, respectively. Quinn even suggested that one of the fire sale trades that preceded Durant — those of Kyrie Irving and James Harden — also deserve some praise. For his part, Gozlan said he believed the Bridges trade alone warranted him consideration as Executive of the Year in 2024-25.
The two also offered critiques of Marks, particularly on the loss of the “Big Three” but in general that stand firmly on the side of NBA punditry that think Marks may be about to turn the corner again … with the support of the team’s owner, Joe Tsai.
“They’ve consistently done very well when trading away their own players,” said Quinn with Gozlan nodding in agreement. “Think about what the market was for Kyrie when hey traded him away to Dallas Getting what they got for Kyrie was a win.
“The Kevin Durant trade?!? The home run of home runs. Other than the Paul George trade, maybe the best selling away trade of a player in NBA history. I guess they didn’t get Shai Gilgeous Alexander (as OKC in the 2019 Paul George trade.) That’s why the Paul George trade has to be better. but you get the point. It was a historically great trade.”
The two officially were discussing Quinn’s February 17 analysis of all 30 NBA front offices on Gozlan’s “Third Apron” podcast (starting at about 42:00 in) but wound up going more in depth. That analysis was published coincidentally on the 10th anniversary of Marks hiring by the Nets. It ranked the Nets F.O. 15th. Quinn has admitted, including in talking with Gozlan, that he now thinks Marks deserves even a higher grade, that his analysis may have been colored by pushback he received after ranking Marks 17th last year! Gozlan said that he had voted for Marks as Executive of the Year in 2024 based mainly on the biggest off-shoot of the deal, the subsequent trade to Mikal Bridges to the Knicks!
“They have held on to their players throughout good offers in search of great ones and that has worked out very very well for them. Like how many offers did they get for Mikal Bridges that would have been fine. Like if they had traded him to Memphis for all those picks (in the aftermath of the KD trade) that would have been a decent trade. I think the Rockets came in with an offer at one point. I don’t know what it was. They waited and got the historic haul for Mikal Bridges, that now looks like an awesome trade for him.”
As Adrian Wojnarowski reported at the 2024 trade deadline, the Nets had offers of four or five firsts that they turned down. Brian Lewis subsequently wrote that the Rockets offer mentioned by Quinn would have retuned two firsts and other assets to Brooklyn and there was a rumor that the Trailblazers would’ve offered the rights to Scoot Henderson.
“They waited on Cam Johnson too. It might have cost them draft position in 2025. I think Egor Demin looks good. I’d be very excited to have him. Maybe they could have gotten higher up in that lottery, who’s to say. BUT they get an unprotected pick for Cam Johnson plus Michael Porter Jr. who’s better than Cam Johnson. That’s a killer trade”.
“I don’t think you can fault them for holding on to their guys. It’s worked out for them,” Quinn added. (One league source told ND that indeed that policy of waiting for a better deal has been a criticism of Marks. Quinn also said that the Nets have succeeded in some lesser deals areas have some big if less tangible assets.
“They’ve done pretty well on the margins. Day’Ron Sharpe is one of the better back-up values in the NBA,” the CBS Sports writer added, speaking of the two-year, $12.5 million contract Sharpe signed last summer. The second year of that contract is a team option making it even more favorable to Nets.
“Jordi Fernandez … awesome coaching hire,” Quinn added. “I think that’s going to manifest in the enxt couple of years. And by the way we don’t think about them because they’re not the Knicks, but they ARE in New York, they ARE a big market team. Guys want to live there. By the way, I don’t know if casual fans know this, when you play for the Knicks, you don’t live in New York City. Their practice facility is in in Westchester, They’re an hour away. When you play for Brooklyn, your practice facility in sin Brooklyn. You get to live in New York It’s a very desirable place to be.”
His bottom line: “They’re loaded with draft picks right now. They’re in an awesome position. They’re going to be good again in two or three years.”
Gozlan echoed Quinn in many ways.
“I had Sean Marks as my big vote for Executive of the Year mainly because of the Bridges trade,” he noted. “I thought that if those rumors were true that the Nets declined four picks for Mikal Bridges from the Grizzlies in 2023 as soon as soon as they got him. If that was true, I thought it was they declined these trades. and yet to worked out.
“You’re right. They are so good at valuing players on the market. and knowing how long that value could sustain I really can’t think of a situation where that lost value on a guy although maybe if you want to say Kyrie.That was Kyrie destroying his own value.”
Quinn countered by arguing that the Nets “lost a ton of value with Harden.” (Internally the company line on the deal centered on Harden-for-Ben Simmons is that neither the Nets nor the 76ers won that trade.)
“As an organization you have to bear some blame for what went wrong for Kyrie and Durant and Harden, like when a player quites on you like James Harden did, that’s a red flag,” Quinn argued, reiterating the single biggest criticism of the Nets front office, its inability, at least in the hires before Fernandez, to choose the right coach.
“I think the Steve Nash coaching hire. I think it showed some promise early. They just thought we’re not going to need an experienced coach. Oh now, you did need an experienced coach,” said Quinn. “I think they let the players have a little bit too much control over the roster and therefore there was nobody to put their hands on the wheel when things went south. Trading Jarrett Allen to appease Kyrie and Kevin Durant? Not looking great.”
“I think there are some organizational things they should be dinged for but mostly I’m thinking I should have ranked them a little bit higher. and maybe let backlash from previous rankings get to me.
Gozlan agreed.
“But when you think of all the things they do on the margins … they’re excellent at free agency, not just getting KD and Kyrie, but getting all these good players to come on the minimum. There’s so many good assets that they good in the buyout market,” he said, referring primarily to Blake Griffin and Lamarcus Aldridge, even getting Paul Milsap and Goran Dragic,“ admitting ”they really didn’t work out.“
“Theyre pretty good at the draft,” Gozlan, editor of capsheets.com, said ticking off the 20 and 30-something values they got: Jarrett Allen, Caris LeVert, Nic Claxton, Day’Ron Sharpe, even contending that while Cam Thomas wound up wanting out, they got good value for him at No. 27.“
Gozlan’s one big criticism is big contracts. Not so much superstars but stars.
“Negotiating below maximum contracts leaves a lot to be desired,” he added. “The Claxton deal is okay. The Joe Harris deal was pretty bad. the D’Andre Jordan deal was pretty bad. The one deal that I thought was a pretty good value was the Dinwiddie one from like six seven years ago when they got him at the midlevel at the time.”
Gozlan said he also has questions about the 2025 Draft.
“The strategy going into last year’s draft is pretty hard to evaluate,” he said of the five first round picks. “It just seems so weird that they took all these picks. They don’t have one pick that has real value. You can’t point to anyone there so far that can really turn things around. It’s still early to see if anyone there that can at least become an All-Star. But that’s the kind of thing if they can get only one guy to really pop, that would set them back.”
He, like Quinn, pointed to the failure of the “Big Three” and still less-than-fulsome explanation of what happened.
“Why did all those stars just lose faith in the organization. and we still don’t know what it really is. it just imploded … There’s clearly more than went wrong with that team and until we see them turn the corner with a new group i think it’s reasonable to hold it against them.”
Quinn agreed. “There’s clearly more to the story about what went wrong for that team and until we see them turn the corner with that team, the new group, I think it’s reasonable to hold that against them BUT if in two or three years, they’re really good, it’s going to pretty easy to push them up because we can just look back at it and say, Kevin Durant has had a checkered few years since he left and Kyrie is Kyrie. It speaks for itself. Harden is now four trades and multiple trades since then. It may have been a weird cocktail of personalities.”
As for the immediate future, Quinn and Gozlan debated whether the Nets exchange of first round picks with the Rockets the same night of the Bridges trade was worth it. In that deal, Marks retrieved the 2025 and 2026 first round picks they lost in the trade that brought Harden to Brooklyn. In return, the Nets gave up picks and swaps between 2027 and 2029 they got from the KD and Kyrie deals.
Quinn was more the skeptic, asking if “the lottery balls they got in 2026 was worth the assets they gave up in the Rockets trade that they ultimately had to give up just to get a pick in the 2026 lottery. I think that’s something that’s going to have play out over time and if they jump up to No. 1 or No. 2, yeah of course The 2026 draft is maybe so good, maybe it’s still worth it but I’d be holding my breath on that.”
Gozlan sees that trade and the Bridges trade as “one big trade,” and believes the Nets “had to do it.”
“I think you still have to do it knowing what we knew at the time that the Nets were so bad in 2024 and with the Suns … no one thought they’d implode as bad as they did.” he said. “I just think it’s better to have control of your draft. That trade doesn’t work without the Mikal Bridges trade. You really have to factor that in as one big mega-trade because the other element is that they’ve got all these Knicks picks in the future. They have control over their destiny and that could come into play whether they get some good picks of value or maybe they could leverage some type of trade in the future with the Knicks.”
We are approaching what Jordi Fernandez confidently described as, “the summer of our lives” and what they do in the off-season is going to tell the tale of just where Marks will stand when Quinn and Gozlan speak again a year from now. Internally, the Nets seem confident in what they have built and where they’re headed.