When the Nets opened training camp a year ago, the expectations were championship or bust.
That window is shut and those days are gone.
With Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving traded away, Brooklyn opened camp with title aspirations replaced by hopes of just making the playoffs.
Spencer Dinwiddie has seen multiple iterations of this team, from an NBA-worst 20-62 record in 2016-17 to superteam pressure to spunky upstarts in-between.
And the veteran guard admits this squad isn’t a title contender or a lottery-level rebuild — and frankly isn’t sure what it is yet.
“I don’t think, as a group, we know our ceiling,” Dinwiddie said. “Knowing that we don’t have our picks, obviously we’re not going to tank. No team that’s trying to be competitive wants to be in the play-in, so I’d say by process of elimination, that’s where you want to start. As high as we can take it, we want to take it.”
Tell us you’re aiming for the sixth seed without telling us you’re aiming for the sixth seed.
For the Nets, with Jacque Vaughn getting his first camp to meld and mold his squad, avoiding the play-in is a reasonable goal.
It remains to be seen if it’s reachable, with the cushion built up behind Durant and Irving the only reason last season’s Nets managed to limp into the playoffs at 45-37 as the sixth seed.
“We’re more talented than my early teams,” Dinwiddie said. “Obviously a little bit older, too. We were kind of young and scrappy; we were all like 24.
“We’re young in terms of our depth, but the people that are going to play are 30, 27, 28. So we’re in a winning position, not necessarily, obviously, a championship position like we were with the superstars. So it’s somewhere in the middle. But we definitely have a lot of youth in terms of our depth, and I think it’s fun to build culture and watch guys grow.”
Dinwiddie and Dorian Finney-Smith — who both arrived from Dallas for Irving — are 30, as is Royce O’Neale.
Mikal Bridges and Cam Johnson, who each came from Phoenix in the Durant deal, are 27, like Ben Simmons. Nic Claxton is the youngest starter at 24. The bench includes hungry young minimum-salary types and teen rookies.
“Underdogs to say the least,” Lonnie Walker IV said. “We got a lot of players who’re still trying to prove themselves within the league.”
The quintet of Dinwiddie, Bridges, Johnson, Finney-Smith and Claxton was Vaughn’s preferred lineup after last season’s trades, and went 11-13. That .458 winning percentage would’ve put them behind 10th-seeded Chicago — so out of the play-in tournament.
Bridges said he’s looking forward to the continuity of this season, unlike last season when they dealt with a coaching change early before the stars were dealt away.
“So I’m very excited, and expectation for us is to win games … playoffs for me and then go from there. I don’t see why we shouldn’t make the playoffs at all.”
Their hope is that not having to mesh players from Brooklyn, Phoenix and Dallas on the fly midseason will help cohesion. But how much of their lost offense can that cohesion mask?
“For us as a team, we’re going to maximize who we are. I’m not sure what that looks like,” said Vaughn. “I talked about being extremely detailed and playing hard. So right now, we’ll think about those two things. That’ll carry us and the competitive piece every single night — let’s see where that leads us.”
Between the New York market and lack of their own draft picks, neither ownership nor the front office had any appetite for tanking. They want to remain competitive (thus rejected offers of multiple first-rounders for Bridges), but what exactly does that entail?
“We haven’t really set anything, honestly. I feel like the plan’s just to get better every day, play hard, play fast, and just play to our style of play and see where it takes us,” Cam Thomas said. “We don’t really have expectations right now that I know of.”