Sigh. Brooklyn Nets to pick eighth overall in the 2025 NBA Draft following lottery

CONTENT WARNING: What you’re about to see is, admittedly, disturbing.

It would be unfair to bestow this sight upon Brooklyn Nets fans without a forewarning, so here it is. What follows is a list of #8 overall picks from the NBA’s last two decades, which starts out decently with Rudy Gay, and finishes well with Dyson Daniels and Franz Wagner. But uh, in between, well, the weak-stomached should avert their eyes:

Prior to the 2000s, which started with Jamal Crawford’s strong NBA career at #8, the eighth slot had some success. Sam Jones is in the Hall of Fame, as are Robert Parish and Jack Sikma, drafted in back-to-back years.

The reason I bring this up is, as you likely know, the Brooklyn Nets landed at No. 8 in the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery on Monday night. While the emotions will settle, and we will likely talk ourselves into the group of potentially available prospects over the coming six weeks, it is a colicky result in the immediate.

Brooklyn, to kickstart this rebuild, went 26-56 this past season. Following a 9-10 start and excluding a faintly fluky start to February, where opponents shot well under 30% from deep, they were a terrible NBA team in 2024-25.

That was, of course, by design. In June 2024, General Manager Sean Marks made a universally praised trade following the Mikal Bridges heist, exchanging four Phoenix Suns assets for control of Brooklyn’s own drafts in 2025 and 2026…

One year later, and Brooklyn is picking eighth overall in the 2025 NBA Draft, while Houston is picking two spots behind them at tenth, thanks to the futility of the Phoenix Suns.

It hurts.

Much handwringing was done about the extent to which the Nets “tanked” in 2025, whether their 9-10 start doomed their pursuit of Cooper Flagg from the beginning, whether they should have been as shameless as the Philadelphia 76ers in chasing top-5 odds.

Well, the Philadelphia 76ers did jump to the third pick on Monday night, but the god-awful Utah Jazz and Washington Wizards fell to fifth and sixth, respectively. Still, those are higher than eighth. (It was the second straight lottery where the team with the worst record dropped to fifth and a team with 10th or 11th worst odds won it all.)

Just to twist the knife even deeper, the two other Texas teams will be picking at the top of the 2025 NBA Draft. The San Antonio Spurs will select second (or perhaps trade that pick for a certain Greek fella), and yes…

Monday night was seemingly designed to hurt the Brooklyn Nets, who, one year into the rebuild, have hardly seemed to make any progress in roster-building.

But that’s just the hurt talking. The Mavericks, Sixers, and Spurs seem to have benefitted from more luck in a single drawing of ping-pong balls on Monday night than the Nets have seen since their 1976 ABA title, but the past is the past. The 2025 season was the 2025 season, whatever our feelings on it are.

And now, the treasure chest may be missing its crown jewel, but it’s not barren…

(One may be inclined to notice, following the above social media post from the Nets, that there is no number 8 subway line in New York City.)

So, Brooklyn will not capture the Flagg this season. Instead, a smattering of promising — yes, promising! — names they may be looking at, barring a trade, include:

• Kon Knueppel
• Jeremiah Fears
• Derik Queen
• Noa Essengue
• Tre Johnson
• Collin Murray-Boyles
• Kasparas Jakučionis
• Jase Richardson

and more. If you feel a strong desire to read an analysis of one of these prospects first (or to add a name to the list), comment below.

Already, draftniks are out with their predictions for this year’s No. 8. ESPN has them taking Kon Knueppel, the 6’7” wing from Duke while Tankathon has them taking Knueppel’s 7’2” teammate Khaman Maluach.

One more note: Since the 76ers retained their own pick by jumping into the top-4, they now owe Brooklyn a pick in 2028, not 2027. And the protections are now so complicated, you might need a law degree to parse it:

The NBA hurts. Not just the games themselves, but the drama that often seems to inflict a great deal of pain on the Nets.

And yet, there was a 20.6% chance of Brooklyn getting the #8 pick, second-highest only to the #7 pick, which would have felt quite similar. How have we tricked ourselves into feeling disappointed here?

Well, this is the clearest fork in the road any rebuilding team has to go through. Over the next few weeks, months, and seasons, Nets fans will disagree with each other on the direction of the franchise. Draft this guy, trade this guy, don’t trade that pick, this guy actually isn’t as good as you think.

But the NBA Draft Lottery offers no such grey areas. You win or you lose or you get a middling result. It does not determine the whole future of your franchise, as Nets legend Anthony Bennett can tell you, but it damn sure informs it.

Perhaps the Brooklyn Nets will be okay. With all this cap space, all these future picks — 15 firsts and 16 seconds — and a home arena in the greatest city on Earth, they likely will.

But the time for such optimism is not Monday night. After all that, Brooklyn is picking eighth in the 2025 NBA Draft.

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