Longtime readers of the BBR blog will know that, going into the 2009-10 campaign, two teams had opened the NBA season with 17 consecutive losses: the 1988-89 Miami Heat (an expansion team) and the 1998-99 L.A. Clippers (whose ignominious streak came in February and early March, thanks to the lockout). Well, move over guys, because this year's Nets are not just "in your neighborhood" or "on your block" (or whatever Mercury Morris calls it)... they're on your front porch. After predictably falling to the Lakers in L.A. last night, New Jersey has now lost their 17th straight contest to start the year, tying the Heat and Clips' all-time mark for season-opening futility -- and with the Dallas Mavericks (#5 in last week's BBR Rankings) on tap in their next game, there's a good chance we'll see an infamous kind of history made Wednesday night.

So in anticipation of New Jersey's "must-win" vs. the Mavs, let's see how their team stacks up against the other two teams whose record they're desperately trying not to break:

1988-89 Miami Heat

Coach: Ron Rothstein
Best Player by Win Shares: Grant Long
Highest-Paid Player: Rony Seikaly

Why They Were Terrible: Most expansion teams struggle to score, but these guys couldn't score at all. Out of 25 teams in the league, they ranked dead last in Offensive Rating, a full 3 points per 100 possessions worse than the 24th-ranked offense, the L.A. Clippers. Their go-to guys were Kevin Edwards and Rony Seikaly; in a league where teams averaged 1.078 points/poss., the Heat scored just 0.909 points when one of those two ended a possession, so it's no surprise that they had the worst offense in basketball. The Miami defense wasn't exactly outstanding either, ranking 18th in the league, but Grant Long, Seikaly, and Billy Thompson were at least respectable. Had they been able to cobble together any kind of scoring attack, they would have won at least 20-25 games. Instead, this Heat offense was one of the worst you'll ever see.
How They Escaped Basketball Hell: Miami wasn't much better in their 2nd season, winning just 18 games, but by 1991-92 they had won 38 games and made the playoffs. To his credit, Seikaly improved markedly after his disastrous rookie campaign, and he combined with Long (a great defensive player who Miami had the sense to hold onto from their 1st season) and young scorers like Glen Rice and Steve Smith to form a decent talent base. Then again, the Heat wouldn't truly become a strong team until 1995-96, when they hired Pat Riley as their coach and assembled the Alonzo Mourning/Tim Hardaway core that would lead them to success in the late 1990s.

1998-99 Los Angeles Clippers

Coach: Chris Ford
Best Player by Win Shares: Tyrone Nesby
Highest-Paid Player: Stojko Vrankovic

Why They Were Terrible: Um, for starters, their highest-paid player was Stojko Vrankovic. And he was not some throw-in to match salaries, either -- the Clipps traded Stanley Roberts for him straight-up in the summer of 1997 and actually played him almost 1,000 minutes in 97-98. Another bad omen for L.A. was the fact that they drafted notorious bust Michael Olowokandi with the 1st pick in the 1998 draft, and were planning on building their franchise around him. Seriously. When they finally made it to the hardwood in February after the lockout ended, the Clippers proved to be one of the league's worst defensive teams thanks to an idiotic gambling style that saw them rank 14th in the NBA in steals but dead last in shot defense and defensive rebounding. They also had problems on offense, as the Kandi Man sputtered to one of the worst offensive performances of the year (.445 TS%, 88.9 ORtg) and their two heaviest possession-users, Maurice Taylor and Lamond Murray, proved badly miscast in go-to roles. The Clippers weren't exactly good before this, but the '99 season proved to be the nadir of the Elgin Baylor era in L.A. (which is really saying something).
How They Escaped Basketball Hell: It would take the Clippers seven seasons to recover from 98-99 enough to make the playoffs. The team's pitiful performance in 2001 "earned" them the #2 pick in the '01 draft, which they spent on Tyson Chandler and immediately traded to Chicago for Elton Brand (a rare good trade for the franchise -- remember, there was a time when EB was actually a great player), but it wasn't until the team surrounded Brand with solid complimentary pieces like Sam Cassell, Chris Kaman, Corey Maggette, & Cuttino Mobley that the Clips achieved some measure of success. Which is just further proof that botching a top pick as spectacularly as Los Angeles did with Olowokandi can set your franchise back nearly a decade, if not longer.

2009-10 New Jersey Nets

Coaches: Lawrence Frank, Tom Barrise
Best Player by Win Shares: Brook Lopez
Highest-Paid Player: Bobby Simmons

Why They Are Terrible: Like the expansion Heat of 20 years ago, New Jersey can't score at all, ranking dead last in the league in offensive rating by nearly 3 points/100 poss. They have the game's worst eFG% by a startling margin (NJ's .425 mark is miles from #29 Minnesota's .453), and nobody on the roster is even scraping the league-average in that category. Their most talented player, Devin Harris, has missed 10 games so far with a strained groin suffered in the team's 2nd game of the season, and he's been extremely limited when he has played, scoring just 18.3 P/36 on a .450 TS% (compare to 21.2 and .563 last year). Brook Lopez and Chris Douglas-Roberts picked up the slack admirably while Harris was injured, but new addition Rafer Alston and rookie Terrence Williams have been awful, Yi Jianlian is hurt & looking like a major bust, and Courtney Lee has been an offensive disappointment as well. In short, everything that could go wrong for New Jersey has so far this season.
How They Can Escape Basketball Hell: Er... signing LeBron James next summer? Short of that, they obviously have to surround Harris and Lopez with guys who can actually play. Douglas-Roberts is a nice complimentary piece, but they need more players of similar quality to emerge from the hole they're in now (they thought Terrence Williams would be that kind of impact player, though he hasn't materialized so far). That means Lee needs to build on the potential he flashed during the Finals a year ago, and while Yi will likely never live up to the expectations of the #6 overall pick in the draft, they need him to be more than the out-and-out bust his career path is trending towards right now. Then there's the impending franchise relocation to Brooklyn (or Newark?), and -- joke about LBJ if you want -- there are nonetheless going to be major roster moves made next summer. In other words, this whole franchise is in serious upheaval: in terms of the other two 0-17 teams, they're almost like the Heat, almost a quasi-expansion team. The good news is that they have a nice PG-C core to build around, but there's still a lot of work to be done to drag this franchise out of basketball hell.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Analysis, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.