Nets Given Tough Grade For Quiet Trade Deadline

The Brooklyn Nets were relatively clean at trade deadline season after having made moves earlier in the year to jettison Dennis Schroder, Shake Milton and Dorian Finney-Smith.

They had a chance to move even further down the line of their rebuild by trading away Cam Johnson, but they opted to keep him.

CBS Sports writer Sam Quinn believed that they didn't push the envelope far enough, which is why he awarded the Nets a "C-" for their trade deadline efforts.

"The real sin here was committed over the summer. The Nets knew they were tanking the moment they traded for control of their 2025 and 2026 first-round picks back. At that point, they needed to start trading every valuable player that wasn't nailed down. Getting maximum value wasn't the point," Quinn writes.

"Keeping Cam Johnson and Nic Claxton allowed the Nets to win games they otherwise would have preferred to lose. Sure enough, the Nets currently have only the sixth-best lottery odds. That would be acceptable for a normal tanker, but the Nets paid a premium to get their picks back. Doing so only made sense because they themselves could have intentionally maximized the value of those picks. They didn't because they insisted on maximizing the value of their players. It's too early to say for certain how much that will matter, but it's possible, and perhaps likely, that the lottery balls they sacrificed by keeping their players for too long prove more valuable than anything any of them do on the court. That they failed to land a first-round pick for either Dennis Schroder or Dorian Finney-Smithis just the icing on the cake. Brooklyn is headed in the right direction overall, and Jordi Fernandez has been a great rookie coach. They just didn't tank hard enough."

The Nets have gone back and forth on who they want to be, and their lack of commitment towards one side over the other could stunt the overall progress of the rebuild.

The Nets are back in action on Monday as they take on the Charlotte Hornets. Tipoff is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. ET.