Mikal Bridges at a press conference earlier this year (Photo by YES Network, CC BY 3.0)
The ‘stunning’ Nets trade that will define their next few seasons, explained
The team has reportedly traded Mikal Bridges, their last remaining star player — to the Knicks, no less. Here's what it means
“Stunning.” “Blockbuster.” “Massive.”
Those are the adjectives from just a few of the articles on the Brooklyn Nets’ headline-grabbing trade with their crosstown rival New York Knicks reported Tuesday night. And they’re not exaggerating.
The Nets will ship Mikal Bridges, their one remaining star player, across the river in a deal that nets them a slew of draft picks from the Knicks and other teams, according to a scoop by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. The Nets declined to comment on the specifics of the report.
Still, you might be wondering why one would make such a trade, and what it means for the future of the team. We got you.
What’s the context here?
Mikal Bridges was the highest profile asset netted in the trade that sent superstar Kevin Durant to the Phoenix Suns in the middle of the 2022-23 season. Bridges was then immediately seen as a piece that the Nets could build a new, younger core of players around, after the failure of the Durant-plus-Kyrie-Irving-and-James-Harden-super-team — he was in his mid-20s, and his points per game stats had been climbing year-to-year.
At first, that looked like an ingenious move, as Bridges averaged over 26 points per game in his first few months as a Net in 2023. But this past season, cracks in the plan began to show: Bridges’ average dipped below 20 points per contest, even as the team relied on him to carry them almost every game. Some young players showed promise around him, but he did not blossom into the superstar that Nets ownership wanted him to be, and the Nets finished towards the bottom of the Eastern Conference, with a 32-50 record.
Furthermore, Bridges — who’s often referred to as a “two-way player” because of his skills on defense, too — signaled that he was unhappy in the spotlight and yearned to play for a team on which he could fill more of a supporting role.
Enter the Knicks. As a team that fell one series shy of the eastern conference finals two years in a row — and are just looking for a couple of supporting pieces to fill out their roster for another championship run behind star Jalen Brunson — they also happen to be full of Bridges’ teammates from college at Villanova. Brunson, Josh Hart and Donte DiVincenzo have publicly had a blast playing together as Knicks, and Bridges never hid his jealousy: On a podcast with Hart during the season, he nodded along as Hart argued that the Knicks fan base was far more robust than Brooklyn’s.
“Very excited for the Villanova boys to reunite,” said Brooklyn-based Knicks fan Eric McLaud, a coach at Clara Barton High School in Crown Heights, who was watching the Yankees lose to the Mets at Greenwood Park beer garden when the news was first reported. “Team chemistry will be amazing. Bridges loves New York in general so it will be a great fit. I see him finding long-term success at the Garden.”
So what happened last night?
The Nets, miraculously, have zero picks in this summer’s NBA draft, after years of costly trades for stars like the aforementioned Durant, Irving and Harden. Prior to that, they nabbed over-the-hill stars like Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce.
Last night, they apparently decided enough was enough. They parted ways with the unhappy Bridges to kickstart a rebuilding process in earnest.
The haul they received in return, as many analysts have concurred, is quite hefty: first-round draft picks in 2025, 2027, 2029, 2031; a second-round pick in 2025; and a few other draft swaps with other teams like the Houston Rockets and Milwaukee Bucks (a swap is literally an agreement to swap picks; whatever picks the Nets and Rockets receive through the draft lottery in a future year, for instance, will be switched).
The Knicks also gave the Nets Bojan Bodganovic, a 35-year-old Croatian winger who can still score at an impressive pace (15.2 ppg last season) but just had a couple of surgeries on his foot and wrist.
You’re saying the Nets lost the man with arguably the best nickname in team history?
Yes, the “Brooklyn Bridges” nickname is no more.
So what’s next?
For Nets fans, this trade means a lot of good and bad to come.
In the immediate, the team will likely stink for a few more years. Without Bridges — and excluding the unreliable former star Ben Simmons, a mysterious 6-foot-10 guard who has barely played over the past few seasons for a wide variety of reasons — the Nets roster is a mish-mash. Center Nic Claxton is established as a starter on the NBA level, and 22-year-old guard Cam Thomas has shown some very promising star-level scoring ability over his first couple of seasons (this past year, for example, he became the youngest player ever to score 40 points in three straight games). But other than that, question marks abound about the rest of the team’s youthful and mid-career players. Thomas might also get traded, ESPN reports.
Still, for many fans, this reset might feel like a breath of fresh air.
For over a decade, the Nets have tried the get-good-quick scheme, preferring to chase star players and massive contracts, over a slow build. Those multiple rounds of superteams — and their spectacular failures — have worked to make other teams wary of the strategy, which was made popular years ago when LeBron James went to the Miami Heat.
Tuesday night’s trade shows that the team is finally focused on building a strong foundation of young players and finding the next crop of stars to keep in their prime. Looks like it’s time to sit back, microwave the popcorn and trust the process.
