For the past couple of years, the Brooklyn Nets have become one of the bottom dwelling teams in the league.
According to Brian Windhorst and Zach Lowe of ESPN, this has come to a head in the financial department as the team lost $44.3 million last season, which was only second to the Detroit Pistons at $45.1 million.
The 30 teams combined to earn more than $530 million in net income in the 2016-17 season, the documents show. What's more, these numbers focus only on basketball operations; several teams own their arenas, and revenue they generate from hosting non-basketball events is not included in the league's basic financial reporting. For example, the Nets lost about $44 million last season, the documents show, but that doesn't account for revenues from the Barclays Center, which the team's parent company owns.
To be fair, Brooklyn are alone in this regard as 14 out of the 30 teams in the NBA did not make any revenue last season. It is a league-wide issue that should be addressed more greatly moving forward given how many teams it has impacted.
That said, the Nets struggled to remain profitable despite moving the franchise to Brooklyn for what they believed was an opportunity to become a successful organization. It has been anything but that in the last few years.
This may be why the Nets were willing to trade away one of their core pieces on the team in Brook Lopez to acquire D'Angelo Russell from the Los Angeles Lakers. There is plenty of hope on his shoulders that he can develop into a franchise cornerstone player that can help quickly turn the team around. However, if things remain the same, profit losses like this may continue to happen.
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