The New York Knicks' top executives were Mad Men for dealing five first round draft picks, and a swap, to the Brooklyn Nets for Mikal Bridges. The perception was that Sean Marks had exploited an unforeseen stench of desperation emanating as a result of the Knicks' championship pursuits, leaving Leon Rose and William Wesley's front office on the wrong end of a subprime mortgage.
However, Bridges has somehow lived up to the massive expectations throughout the Knicks' playoff runs. And the NBA's latest efforts to curb tanking just made New York's braintrust the obvious winners of the crosstown blockbuster.
NBA's new tanking rules just depreciated the Nets' stock of Knick picks
Bridges laid out a blueprint in his first year in Manhattan, following up the regular season with an infamously cold-blooded pair of games against the Boston Celtics. The two-way wing might not look like Brandon Roy or Gary Payton each night, but he'd play every single game and deliver his best when the stakes are high.
The trade-off, literally, for the Nets was the large amount of draft capital they received in return for Bridges. But with the NBA's new tanking reform, which flattens odds amongst losing teams and generally disincentivizes losing as a strategy, it's hard to say those picks still have the same value.
There are plenty of new wrinkles in the CBA as a result of these anti-tanking regulations. Aside from the amount of teams receiving some allotment of ping-pong balls increasing by two, it's also less feasible of a strategy to tank for several seasons in a row.
Teams can no longer win the #1 overall pick in back to back seasons, nor can they have a pick land in the top five of three consecutive drafts. These limits even apply to picks acquired from other teams, such as the Nets' picks from the Knicks.
It seems quite unlikely that New York's draft picks will have any chance of landing close to the top of the draft. But things tend to change lightning quick at the NBA level. The flattened lottery odds and caps on sustained success at the top of the draft effectively protect them from what was previously the worst-case scenario of their deal for Bridges.
The Nets building a winner — one the Knicks couldn't, even with Bridges — using draft picks from both of New York City's NBA teams would objectively sting for Knick fans. But New York has so much of a winner, they're in the 2026 NBA Finals. And the new rules just made the Nets' chances of making something worthwhile happen with all of those draft picks even lower.
Add us as a preferred source on Google