Is D’Angelo Russell a part of the Nets’ future yeah or nah? He’s around in Brooklyn for one more year and then they’ll decide if they want to pay him or not. Contracts confuse me, but I bet Brooklyn will have his Bird Rights (whatever those are) and will be able to pay him more money than any other team. The question is, will they even want to do that? Russell is probably a legit 20 PPG scorer when given minutes, and he sort of sometimes passes the ball, but he’s mostly just a volume scorer.
Maybe the question boils down to: will Russell be a star in this league? If you ignore the fact that scoring 20 PPG by default makes you a “star” in some sense, I would lean towards “no” on that one, but I’m also the guy with a major distaste for Monta Ellis-type players ever since the original Monta Ellis came to the Bucks and instantly transformed my life into a waking nightmare from which the only respite was the swift caress of the Reaper’s blade. The only thing more Nets than trading away all your draft picks is locking up a guy who shoots twenty shots a game to a max, or close to max deal, thus limiting the potential of the team for the next half decade.