It would be easy to go in HARD on the Brooklyn Nets for seemingly ruining the development of every young big man on their roster by going out and signing a listless, washed-up DeAndre Jordan for some obscene amount of money (they could pay me 1/100th of that money to be the team’s personal highlight slave and I would be totally cool with that), but I’m instead going to approach the topic from a place of empathy.
From the Nets’ perspective, locking up Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant, with the complementary piece of DeAndre Jordan, was a straightforward way to rule the Eastern Conference for at least a season or two. They wanted a guaranteed contributor at center, not the undersized scrawny froman Jarrett Allen or the completely unproven and untested Nicolas Claxton (whose locks are just as magnificent as Allen’s, just in a different way). So what if everybody’s been injured and the Nets are performing way below expectations? That doesn’t mean the plan wasn’t a good idea. It just means that the plan was prone to failure and maybe everybody involved in the creation of said plan was being too optimistic.
The good news in all of this is that Kenny Atkinson is smart enough not to play Jordan thirty minutes per game in a misguided effort to win games. He sees the value in developing Allen and Claxton. The development is paying off because, if you hadn’t already realized it, Claxton is now OFFICIALLY a stretch five. He hit one of two three-point attempts this game. Any previous assertions that Jarrett Allen was a stretch five should be disregarded at this point. Those were false alarms. But the alarms I’m currently sounding for Nicolas Claxton’s stretchiness at the center position are TRUE ALARMS.