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| The Nets will hold their training camp here, at Duke University's basketball complex. The reason that Brooklyn is heading to Durham, NC for training camp: Billy King (and draft pick Mason Plumlee) are alums of the school |
With the Brooklyn Nets' preseason opener just eight days away in Washington D.C. vs the Wizards, the regular season is approaching at a lightning-quick pace. That means that training camp starts tomorrow, as the Nets travel down the Eastern Seaboard from Brooklyn to Durham, North Carolina for a couple of days of practice that hopefully will begin to build the chemistry between players that this team needs.
The Nets' regular season slate begins a month from today on the road in Cleveland with the much-hyped home opener against the Heat takes place two days later, further emphasizing the team's need for a quick start out of the gates.
Brooklyn has made a bunch of moves in the last couple of days to bring its roster from the 15 fully-guaranteed spots it has to training camp's maximum of 20. Billy King has already added guard Jorge Gutierrez and swingmen Chris Johnson and Gary Forbes to the mix, while also signing veteran NBA guard Marko Jaric to compete for a spot on the team behind Deron Williams and Shaun Livingston.
Gutierrez, who has bounced around the D-League and has made a name for himself on the Mexican National Team, was a standout for the Cal-Berkeley Golden Bears in college and earned many honors during his career in the Pac-12. He's an in-between guard, not quite a pure point but not a bonafide shooting guard. Gutierrez is a scorer more than anything else, as he averaged 14.6 and 13.0 points per game respectively in his two seasons at Cal, but also isn't a terrible rebounder for his size and has solid court vision.
Johnson, most recently with the Grizzlies, and Forbes, a native Brooklynite who played in China last season after spending time with the Nuggets and Raptors, each stand around 6'6" in height and bring some scoring ability to the table for training camp, even though it's very realistic that they–along with Gutierrez–start their season in Springfield with the Armor.
Johnson had a brief cup of coffee (eight games) with Memphis last year in minimal playing time while Forbes has made the circuit a bit, playing with six teams on continents from just 2009 to 2010. He was a highly-recruited player out of Benjamin Banneker Academy in Brooklyn, starting his college career at Virginia before transferring to UMass. However, he wasn't drafted in 2008, eventually making his way to Denver for the 2010-11 season in which was a decent bench option for the Nuggets before serving a similar role with Toronto the next year.
Jaric, who hasn't been in the NBA since 2009 and hasn't played professionally since 2011, spent parts of eight seasons with the Clippers, Timberwolves, and Grizzlies but is mostly known for his wife, Victoria's Secret supermodel Adriana Lima. At the tail-end of his playing career, Jaric is nice to have in camp–even if he isn't retained after–as another veteran voice to help Coach Jason Kidd with the development of Deron Williams as an elite point guard. Marko could be this year's Jerry Stackhouse in that sense.
Moving beyond the new acquisitions, this year's training camp may be even a more important one for the Nets than last year's was. Sure, the 2012-13 season was the team's first in Brooklyn, in the Barclays Center, and as a legitimate contender. However, now, Brooklyn has the complete roster depth, talent, and balance necessary to actually compete for a NBA Championship, something that was only possible as a dream last season.
Camp also represents Jason Kidd's first real shot to connect with his team on a coach-to-player platform, as opposed to the player-to-player platform that he has been used to throughout his Hall-of-Fame career. He needs to establish a loose firmness (oxymoronic, I know) with his team that tells his players that he is the boss around town now and that no one player in this group of All-Stars is higher than any other player.
One of the biggest aspects of being a NBA coach is keeping the faith and trust of the players. As we have seen in the past few years in the NBA–most notably with the Pistons' mutiny of former coach John Kuester–when a coach loses his locker room, he might as well have lost his job too. Kidd has to make sure that the Nets fully buy into his system and coaching style because the last thing this team needs is off-court issues, as winning a title over the likes of the Heat and Thunder while dealing with just on-court problems is hard enough.
Other than those more in-depth and long-term topics and idea, this week's training camp in Duke probably won't decide any major position battles (not that Brooklyn has many, if any at all) or reveal any extremely crucial information, obviously with the exception of which, if any, non-roster training camp invitees make the squad. What it does tell us, though, is that real, actual basketball games–even if they don't "count"–start a week from tomorrow, and after that preseason opener, the regular season is right around the corner.
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