There's a reason the Nets players this season are seen as character guys. They've been through a lot and survived, then succeeded. Reading through their life stories, there is a litany of family tragedies, mostly while young
Three players lost their mothers while in their teens: Donald Sloan, Markel Brown and Thomas Robinson.
Brown lost his mother to a brain aneurysm when he 14. Three months later, his uncle, the role model in his life, died heroically while saving two women from a fire in Louisiana.
Robinson lost in order, his maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather and mother in a month when he was at Kansas.