Nets get No. 8 pick in missed opportunity at 2025 NBA Draft Lottery

The Nets’ first lottery pick in 15 years will be a disappointing one, falling to eighth on Monday night’s 2025 NBA Draft Lottery in Chicago.

When Brooklyn general manager Sean Marks and team governor Joe Tsai pivoted and made the tough decision to tank this season for a high draft pick, it ended up giving them the sixth-best odds.

They had a 9 percent chance of winning and being able to start their rebuild around Cooper Flagg.

But it didn’t happen, falling to eighth.

It was the second-likeliest outcome for the Nets at 20.6, behind only seventh (at 29.7).

But considering what it cost them, it will be a bitter outcome.

Brooklyn sent multiple first-round picks (acquired from Phoenix in the Kevin Durant trade) to Houston to re-acquire their own first-rounders this year and next.

That enabled them to move Mikal Bridges, tank and rebuild through the draft.

But after suffering through a 26-56 campaign, Flagg was the prize, and at least finishing in the top four was a goal. 

The Nets got neither.

This selection — presuming the Nets don’t trade it away in a package for a veteran star — will mark the first lottery pick they’ll actually have since 2010.

That season, they tanked their way to a league-worst 12-70 mark in hopes of getting John Wall, but ended up falling to third and having to settle for Derrick Favors.

First-year head coach Jordi Fernandez represented the team on the dais on Monday night, having said before departing for Chicago: “We’re just ready to be lucky.”

That luck ran out, though.

As it usually does around lottery time.

It’s hard to find a team that has suffered more in the lottery than the Nets, both in Brooklyn and their prior New Jersey iteration.

Both have lottery heartache, usually of their own making by trading away picks that eventually came good.

The last half-dozen times that the Nets’ pick ended up in the lottery, they all went to another team.

Damian Lillard (sixth in 2012), Jaylen Brown (third in 2016) and Jayson Tatum (third in 2017) all went elsewhere.

They even saw last year’s pick jump up to third, but it was owed to Houston, who took Reed Sheppard.

Monday night was a chance to turn all that misfortune around.

The Nets have the most future draft picks (31) and first-rounders (15) over the next seven years, including a league-high four in the first round next month.

“This ain’t coming around again,” Marks said in a documentary series, “SCOUT,” released by the team. “This happens once.”

Brooklyn landing eighth will hurt any potential package they have to offer for Giannis Antetokounmpo.

They do have the most first-rounders (15) over the next seven years, 13 of them tradable.

Dallas won the lottery, defying the odds.

They had just a 1.8 percent chance of landing Flagg, the fourth-lowest of any winner in history.

After trading away Luka Doncic in a wildly unpopular move, it offers the Mavericks a stunning opportunity to flip the narrative.

The Spurs vaulted up to No. 2.

It gives them a chance to take Rutgers star Dylan Harper or further ammunition, along with the No. 14 pick, to package and bid for Antetokounmpo.