Brooklyn Nets

Brooklyn Nets, American professional basketball team based in Brooklyn, New York, that plays in the Eastern Conference of the National Basketball Association (NBA). As a member of the American Basketball Association (ABA), the Nets won two championships (1974 and 1976).

The franchise was founded in 1967 and was known as the New Jersey Americans during its first season. The team began playing its home games on Long Island in the 1968–69 season, which led the team to change its name to the New York Nets. While they advanced to the ABA finals in 1971–72, the Nets failed to finish higher than third place in any of their first six seasons.

In 1973 the team traded for superstar forward Julius Erving, who instantly turned the franchise around and led it to a 25-win improvement from the previous season in his first year in New York. The Nets won the ABA title that season, and Erving led the team to a second championship in 1975–76. When the ABA merged with the NBA in 1976, the Nets were forced to raise $8 million in order to join the established league. Lacking many viable assets, the team sold Erving’s contract to the Philadelphia 76ers, and its fortunes quickly turned for the worse: the team had five straight losing seasons upon joining the NBA (though they did qualify for the playoffs in 1979 with a 37–45 record).

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The franchise returned to New Jersey in 1977. In 1981 the Nets moved into their new home in the Meadowlands (having played the previous four seasons on the home floor of the Rutgers University basketball team), hired Larry Brown as their head coach (he left after two seasons), and drafted power forward Buck Williams. A tenacious rebounder, Williams was named Rookie of the Year and led the Nets to their first NBA winning record during the 1981–82 season. The Nets qualified for the playoffs that year and in each of the next four, but only once did they win a postseason series during that span, in 1984 when they knocked off the defending NBA champion Philadelphia 76ers.

After a five-season drought the Nets returned to the playoffs in 1991–92, with a promising young team featuring guards Kenny Anderson and Dražen Petrović as well as forward Derrick Coleman. However, this Nets squad was undone by Petrović’s sudden death in a car accident in 1993 and a spate of misbehavior and inconsistent play by Anderson and Coleman that resulted in a near-complete roster turnover by the end of the 1995–96 season, after producing three first-round postseason eliminations in the early 1990s. In 1996 the Nets also hired John Calipari as head coach, but he was fired during the 1998–99 season.

New Jersey had one more winning season through the remainder of the decade and began the 2000s by finishing second to last in their division. In 2001 the Nets traded for point guard Jason Kidd, who instantly revitalized the team and led them to a 26-win improvement from their 2000–01 record in his first year in New Jersey. Behind the play of Kidd and forward Richard Jefferson, the Nets won the Eastern Conference championship and advanced to the NBA finals in both 2001–02 and 2002–03, but they lost each time. The Nets returned to the playoffs in each of the following four seasons, but their level of play precipitously fell off soon thereafter, and the team’s 12–70 record in 2009–10 was the worst in franchise history.

In 2012 the team—which by that time was owned by a group of investors that included notable figures such as Mikhail Prokhorov and Jay-Z—relocated to the brand-new Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn in an effort to capitalize on New York’s larger media market and cultural cachet. A rebuilt and reinvigorated Nets team posted a 49–33 record in 2012–13 but lost in the first round of the NBA playoffs. In the following offseason the Nets traded for All-Star veterans Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce and hired the recently retired Kidd to serve as head coach, but the team struggled to live up to its high expectations early in the 2013–14 season. However, one noteworthy event of that season came on February 23, 2014, when the team signed free agent Jason Collins, who, by playing in Brooklyn’s game that night, became the first openly gay athlete to participate in any of the four major North American team sports. Collins was part of a reinvigorated Nets squad that was among the league’s best in the second half of the season, and the team finished its tumultuous regular season with a postseason berth.

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Kidd forced a rare coach trade to the Milwaukee Bucks in the following offseason, and, after the departures of Pierce and Garnett in 2014 and 2015, respectively, the depleted Nets soon became one of the worst teams in the NBA. Despite having dealt away many of their first-round draft picks of the 2010s in the 2013 Garnett and Pierce trade (a trade that many sportswriters labeled as one of the worst in NBA history), the Nets still managed to put together a competitive young roster that unexpectedly returned to the playoffs in the 2018–19 season (a first-round loss).

During the 2019 offseason the Nets made a splash by signing stars Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant. Also that summer Joseph Tsai, a cofounder of the e-commerce company Alibaba, bought out Prokhorov to become majority owner of the team. Durant missed the entire 2019–20 campaign as he recovered from a torn Achilles tendon, and Irving’s season ended early with a shoulder injury, but the team still managed to reach the playoffs, where they were swept by the Toronto Raptors. Former two-time league MVP Steve Nash was brought on as head coach in September 2020, and the Nets’ already talented roster was bolstered by the addition of James Harden four months later. Although the three stars played only eight games together during the regular season, Brooklyn entered the playoffs as title contenders. They demonstrated their potential as an offensive powerhouse by defeating the Boston Celtics in round one. But in the second round Irving and Harden both got hurt, and, despite a heroic performance from Durant, the team lost to the eventual champions, the Milwaukee Bucks, in seven games.

That first-round victory over the Celtics turned out to be the high point of the entire Durant-Irving-Harden era in Brooklyn. With the following season set to start in October 2021, the team announced that Irving had chosen to not be vaccinated for COVID-19, making him ineligible to practice or play (he eventually was allowed to participate in away games and, in March 2022, home games, but he played in only 29 games that season). Following an injury to Durant in January 2022, the Nets performed poorly, and a disgruntled Harden—reportedly frustrated by the uncertainty caused by Irving’s absence from the team—was traded to the 76ers in exchange for, among other players, Ben Simmons. In the playoffs the disjointed Nets lost in the first round to the Celtics, 0–4. Weeks into the 2022–23 season Irving was suspended by the team after refusing to clearly disavow a social media post he had made that was widely interpreted as being anti-Semitic. Amid the controversy, Brooklyn fired coach Nash after a 2–5 start. The team’s cohesion failed to recover, and in quick succession Irving and Durant were traded midway through the season. In the aftermath of a chaotic few years, in 2023–24 a young Nets team struggled to a 32–50 record and missed the playoffs.