Was the 2019-20 Brooklyn Nets the worst playoff team in NBA history?
In a recent tweet by Whistle Sports, Adam Kester posed a question of whether the 2019-20 Brooklyn Nets were the worst playoff team in the NBA history. With the Nets’ offseason in full effect, this will be a fun thought exercise to discuss so let’s see how bad that team was relative to the history. of the league.
Brooklyn finished the 2019-20 regular season with a 35-37 record (Kenny Atkinson was fired with a 28-34 record while Jacque Vaughn had a 7-3 record as an interim head coach) and drew the Toronto Raptors in the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs as a result. The Nets eventually lost the series in a sweep as Brooklyn lost to Toronto by an average margin of 20.5 points while allowing the Raptors to score 134 points in Game 1 and 150 points in Game 4.
As Kester pointed out, there are only three players on Brooklyn’s roster that is still in the NBA today: Joe Harris, Caris LeVert, and Jarrett Allen. During the series against the Raptors, Garrett Temple started all four games and Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot started three games. As bad as all of this sounds, according to Josh Evanoff of TheSportster.com, the Nets’ 2019-20 team is only the eighth-worse team in NBA history to make the playoffs behind the 2003-04 Boston Celtics and the 1987-88 San Antonio Spurs.
The 2020 Brooklyn Nets playoff roster was something else. 🤢 @adamkester_ pic.twitter.com/lVnSq7zEP7
— Whistle (@WhistleSports) May 21, 2023
