It is has not been easy to watch Nic Claxton play basketball for the Brooklyn Nets this season. Now nearing the halfway point of his sixth NBA season, such a sentence was previously unthinkable for the #31 pick in 2019.
Claxton was not the biggest acquisition Brooklyn made in June, as you’ll recall. And he only played 47 NBA games over his first two professional seasons, missing the rest due to G League assignments or injury. Didn’t matter.
His debut and subsequent appearances with Brooklyn (and Long Island) came early in that hospital waiting room of a 2019-20 season; it injected life into the fanbase, into the team, into nerds like me yearning for more player development.