Long time reader, first time poster 'round these parts. Figured I'd just give my input because I'm a little drunk right now...maybe more so because the Devils just lost, but I digress.

As the title of this post suggests, what's changed? Listen, all this meltdown business that's gone on in the last 5 hours or so since the results of the draft lottery were made public is both patently absurd and totally unnecessary. There was (roughly) a 75% chance that we wouldn't have a top 3 pick, yet the doom and gloom crowd were not on the ledge a week ago. There was a THREE IN FOUR CHANCE that we would be in the position we were in today and still, most posters on here were carelessly throwing around the potential top-three pick in potential trade ideas for Dwight Howard, or better yet, penciling in Anthony Davis or Michael Kidd-Gilchrist into our future starting five. Everyone step back from the proverbial ledge and take a look at where we are right now.

...and where is that? Nowhere different than where we were yesterday. Nowhere different than where we were right before the draft...and again, there was a three in four chance that that wasn't going to change. You can go on and on and whine about how we've lost a precious asset in our first round pick and drag Billy King's name through the mud, but as some posters have acknowledged on here, is Gerald Wallace really worse than someone we'd have drafted at #6? Andre Drummond? Jared Sullinger? John Henson? Come on, guys. Try to be realistic here - do you expect more production out of any of these guys than Wallace will provide? (I say this assuming he'll stay with Brooklyn, because at the moment, we've got no indication he'll do otherwise.)

Again, we come back to the original question: what's changed? We're exactly where we were before. I find it hard to believe that Deron Williams will ONLY stay in Brooklyn if we were to sign Dwight Howard (and evidently, so does he, based on various Twitter rumblings), and even if we're not able to sign Howard, it's not like there's complete crap on the free agent market this offseason. I'm not naive enough to say that we're instantly going to contend in the Eastern Conference by signing guys like Ersan Ilyasova, Marreese Speights, or Andrei Kirilenko, but l can only hope we (as a fanbase) are not naive enough to believe we're a dumpster fire of a basketball franchise. We have some nice pieces as the team stands right now with MarShon Brooks, Gerald Green, and Bojan Bogdanovic (if he ever manages to escape Turkey)...the Nets have a bright future ahead in Brooklyn, and lots of people realize that, whether you embrace it or not.

Again (and at the risk of me sounding like a total homer), what's changed?

(Immediately, nothing. We've still got Petro, I'm still drunk, and this Bud Light commercial with Pitbull is still awful.)

Go Nets.