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There are a lot of ways to find and develop talent. The Nets have no first round picks, might buy a second rounder and have lost, at least for a year, a single team D-League affiliate. So what are they planning?
Mike Mazzeo quotes Billy King from Thursday afternoon's press conference.
"We may get a draft pick. We’re going to have a free-agent camp on June 2. But we’re bringing in a bunch of guys who played overseas, look at guys who are free agents, played overseas or in the D-League. So we’ll take a look at them in a three- or four-day period. Brooklyn being a place that players want to play and we have a coach [Jason Kidd] who I think players want to play for. I think we play a good style. So I don’t look at it as the sky is falling as much as we have some assets and things we can do and we’ll look at it."
No names, but if he's planning a three or four day camp, that sounds like 10 or more players competing for King's attention and invitations to join the Nets summer league team in Orlando a month later or the team's training camp in October. The Nets ran a similar camp in 2012, which didn't yield any roster players.
King also echoed a new franchise mantra: that the Nets can get players to sign for less, to play in New York, to play for Kidd. He pointed to two players who signed for vets minimums last year despite having better offers elsewhere: Shaun Livingston and Alan Anderson. He could have also noted that the two players the Nets signed for the mini-MLE the last two years turned out to be bargains: Mirza Teletovic in 2012 and Andrei Kirilenko in 2013.
The Nets GM, no matter your opinion of him, has a record of keeping things quiet until the last minute. He didn't reveal much Thursday about his plans or priorities other than this: "So we’re looking at options. We've got some things we're looking at."
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