Deron Williams: Time with Nets 'made me question if I even wanted to play basketball'

The Brooklyn Nets have made the playoffs in each of their three seasons since relocating from New Jersey, a run that could reasonably be considered a success for a handful of NBA franchises. Only seven other teams had an active playoff run that long coming into this season.

The circumstances surrounding those three postseason berths, though, have made the achievement seem a good deal less rosy. The Nets had higher hopes for the roster they mortgaged their future and footed a record luxury-tax bill to field than one Eastern Conference semifinal appearance and two first-round exits.

The upshot - that the now-woeful Nets are not in possession of their own first-round draft pick until 2019 - looks bad. The optics have arguably looked worse.

Head coach Jason Kidd left after one season following a failed coup, spurred by an apparent schism with management. Owner Mikhail Prokhorov spent the bulk of last season trying to find a buyer for the franchise. Paul Pierce famously tore the Nets organization to shreds after leaving Brooklyn for Washington. Joe Johnson said Sunday that this season is the most difficult he's experienced in at least a decade.

Now, Deron Williams, who Pierce specifically singled out as a guy who shrank from the brighter spotlight in New York, said the experience of playing there nearly broke him.

"It took a lot out of me, man, those three years. Some of the hardest in my life," Williams, now a Dallas Maverick, told Michael Lee of Yahoo Sports in an interview published Monday. "Made me question if I even wanted to play basketball when I was done with that contract."

Being "done with that contract" didn't even mean playing it out. It meant accepting a buyout via the stretch provision, which allows the Nets to pay out the remainder of his salary in annual $5.5-million increments until 2020. Given the way things went for him in Brooklyn, Williams had no qualms accepting the buyout and moving on.

"It just never went well," the 31-year-old point guard said earlier this month. "I just felt like everybody felt I was the problem, and so now I'm gone."

Williams played at an All-Star level in his first two seasons as a Net, but his next two were derailed by a litany of injuries, including surgeries on both ankles, and as he struggled to regain his form and play up to his enormous contract, he came to typify the underachieving team's malaise.

Asked what he would have changed about his Nets tenure, Williams told Lee, "everything."

"I wish I wouldn’t have been hurt," he said. "I wish I would've played better and people didn't feel like I was just stealing money. That's the last thing I want people to feel like. It didn't work out the way anybody had hoped. ...

"I knew things would've been different if I wouldn't have been hurt. And wouldn't have had four coaches in three and a half years. Wouldn't have had to learn a new system every six months."

Twisting the knife just a little bit more, Williams held up his new situation - and head coach - as an ideal the Nets have failed to attain.

"I wanted to be somewhere where my coach was going to be there," he said. "It wasn't going to be up in the air, year after year. You see here, (Rick Carlisle)'s not going anywhere. I've heard a lot of great things about him as a coach, and that was a big part of it."

The most dispiriting thing about this for the Nets is how unsurprising it feels. All these revelations of malcontent - from Kidd to Pierce to Johnson to Williams - are isolated instances; on the surface, none necessarily has much to do with any other. But taken together, they paint an ugly picture that doesn't speak well of the Nets brand.

This is particularly pertinent given the team's paucity of forthcoming draft picks and tradeable assets. If they want to improve in the near term, they'll need players to willingly come play for them. They can try to sell themselves on the prospect of financial flexibility (especially with Johnson's $25-million salary coming off the books) ahead of an enticing free-agent summer. But with all the bad buzz, on top of tepid fan engagement and dismal TV ratings, Brooklyn doesn't look like the glimmering basketball destination the city's culture and market suggested it could be when the franchise relocated. And that's a real shame.