The Nets' New Starting Lineup is a Beautiful, Chaotic Mess
Lineup alert: Nets will start Traore, Johnson, Porter Jr., Randle, Sharpe on Wednesday.
The are rolling out a starting five on Wednesday that sounds less like a cohesive NBA unit and more like a randomly generated 2K MyLeague roster from the year 2029.
According to an Underdog NBA tweet, Brooklyn is officially starting Nolan Traore, Chaney Johnson, Michael Porter Jr., Julius Randle, and Day'Ron Sharpe.
This is exactly what happens when injuries force a team to get weird. With rookie Egor Demin officially shut down for the rest of the season due to plantar fasciitis, the Nets are handing the keys to Traore and hoping the car does not immediately crash into a wall.
To be fair, Traore has actually looked like a real NBA player lately. The French guard recently dropped 17 points and four assists in just 23 minutes against the Memphis , shooting 80 percent from deep.
He is stepping into a massive usage vacuum, which is the exact kind of chaos prop bettors love to see on a midweek slate. Figuring out the usage rate between Randle and Porter Jr. is already a math problem, and throwing the rest of this crew into the mix only makes the puzzle harder.
Down low, the veteran duo of Porter Jr. and Randle are basically holding the entire rebounding operation together with duct tape. The two forwards recently combined for 14 of Brooklyn's 27 defensive rebounds in a single game, proving they are the only things keeping this team from getting completely bullied in the paint.
We will find out exactly how this experiment looks when the ball tips off on Wednesday. If this group looks completely lost, expect the Nets to keep shuffling the deck as they navigate the rest of a bizarre season.