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The Brooklyn Nets trade deadline was like no other in league history. Six days before the 2023 NBA trade deadline, the team was looking for ways to improve on the margins. By Thursday at 3 pm ET, the team had made two of the biggest blockbusters ever, trading Kyrie Irving to the Dallas Mavericks and Kevin Durant to the Phoenix Suns.
Assuming the two major trades had to be made, and those weren’t the mistakes in and of themselves, the biggest Nets trade deadline issue is that they didn’t go quite far enough. The team now has a lot of players with overlapping skills, and one of them is on the wrong side of 30 and has just one year left on his deal.
Plus, the Nets surely could have found a trade partner for this beloved NBA vet.
Nets 2023 NBA trade deadline mistake: Not trading Seth Curry
Some might look back at the 2023 NBA trade deadline and see the blockbuster Nets trades of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving as the mistakes.
Here is the reality, though. Once Irving decided to demand a trade with the deadline less than a week away, the die was cast. At that point, the Nets had no options but to make these deals and get as much as they could for their franchise stars.
All in all, owner Joe Tsai and general manager Sean Marks did a pretty good job with proverbial guns to their head.
The final haul from these trades was:
- Five first-round picks: Mavs 2029 and Suns 2023, 2025, 2027, and 2029
- Two second-round picks: Mavs 2027, Mavs 2029
- Five players: Spencer Dinwiddie, Dorian Finney-Smith, Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, and Jae Crowder
Then, before the NBA trade deadline at 3 pm ET on Thursday, the Nets flipped Crowder for two more second-round picks from the Milwaukee Bucks.
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Overall, this was about as good as the franchise could have hoped for when trading two of the biggest stars in the league unexpectedly. The biggest Nets trade deadline mistake, though, was not going one step further.
Seth Curry is a 32-year-old, 10-year NBA vet who is best known for being the younger brother of the greatest 3-point shooter of all time, Stephen Curry. The younger Curry can sling it from downtown himself, though.
In his career, Seth Curry averages 11.2 points, 2.2 assists, 2.2 rebounds, and 0.7 steals per game. However, the reason he’s still making money in the NBA is that he is a career 43.8% 3-point shooter.
Much more like his dad, Dell, than his brother, Seth Curry is a sharpshooting specialist who can find a place on the bench of any contending team in the NBA. He also has one year left on his current deal, which means he’ll be a free agent this offseason. Not trading Seth Curry at the NBA trade deadline was a mistake by the Nets.
Seth could have fetched a first-round pick from a contender, and maybe even more if the Nets paired him with one of the 57 (*approximately) young wings they now have on their roster.
Not trading the young wings was not a mistake by the Nets. Dorian Finney-Smith, Mikal Bridges, Cameron Johnson, Royce O’Neale, and Yuta Watanabe will all hold their value into the offseason, and the Nets can see how they play together for the remainder of 2023.
That said, Seth Curry is not a part of that group. His value went away the second the clock hit 3 pm in the East. The Nets can’t trade him in the offseason, and re-signing him makes no sense for the player or for the organization.
An argument can be made that the Nets are bullish on this new team, and they did beat the Chicago Bulls comfortably after the NBA trade deadline with Spencer Dinwiddie and Dorian Finney-Smith in the lineup. Maybe they think Seth Curry can be a piece to help them hang on in the playoff race this season.
That’s all well and good, but the Nets already have Joe Harris who plays a similar role, and Dinwiddie will need a lot of those minutes as well. Keeping the sharpshooting guard just doesn’t make a ton of sense.
In the end, the Nets trade deadline deals that didn’t happen in 2023 will be forgotten, and all we’ll talk about is the Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant deals. However, that one extra step — that one extra pick — can someday make the difference between these trades working out in the Nets' favor or plunging them into another half-decade or more of despair.
And that's something Nets fans know all too well.
