The Gap Between Bad and Cursed
The Brooklyn Nets finished 20-62. Their point differential of minus-819 over 82 games, roughly minus-10 per night, projected them for about 26 wins by Pythagorean expectation. They fell six wins short of even that bleak baseline. That gap is the largest in the NBA this season. A team's point differential is supposed to tell you how good it is. Brooklyn's point differential said it was terrible. Brooklyn's actual record said hold my beer.
Let's be clear about what's happening here. The Nets were genuinely, structurally bad. A minus-10 per game differential is not a rounding error. It is a team getting outscored by double digits on an average Tuesday in February. The 26-win Pythagorean projection was already the league's worst neighborhood. But Brooklyn didn't just live there. They found the basement, dug through the floor, and kept going.
Their CURSD Luck Index landed at minus-65, the worst mark in the NBA. No team had more distance between its outcomes and what probability, even unfavorable probability, suggested.
Close Games: A One-Win Horror Show
Nothing illustrates the curse better than Brooklyn's record in games decided by five points or fewer: 1-5. That is a 16.7% win rate in the contests most governed by randomness, the ones where a single late-clock bounce or a marginally different whistle changes everything.
League-wide, teams hovering near .500 in close games is the historical norm. Sustained deviation usually regresses. Brooklyn didn't just deviate. They face-planted. One win in six close games means the Nets essentially lost every available coinflip. And because those are the results most likely to have gone differently, they account for a real chunk of that six-win Pythagorean gap. Lose a few of those by two instead of winning them by one, and you go from bad to historically bad.
The Shooting Curse Works Both Ways
Shot quality data makes the picture uglier, and stranger. Brooklyn's offensive effective field goal percentage came in at 52.0%, against an expected eFG of 54.5% based on the quality of looks they generated. That is a minus-2.5 point delta, meaning the Nets consistently created better shots than their results reflected. Shooters missed open looks. Good process produced bad outcomes.
Now flip to the other end. Opponents shot 57.1% eFG against Brooklyn, compared to an expected 54.6%. That is another minus-2.5 delta, this time working against the Nets defensively. Brooklyn's opponents hit shots at rates their own shot quality did not justify.
So the Nets underperformed their shot quality on offense and got torched beyond expectation on defense. A combined five-point swing in eFG deltas, in the wrong direction, on both sides of the ball. That is not scheme. That is weather.
Home Was Not an Advantage
Brooklyn went 12-29 at Barclays Center and 8-33 on the road. A home record of .293 offers almost no refuge, though it was at least marginally better than the .195 road mark. The Nets lost everywhere, but they lost slightly less often in front of their own fans. Small comforts measured in small decimals.
What Regression Would Actually Look Like
Here is what the numbers suggest if the variance corrects. A team with Brooklyn's underlying talent level, a 26-win Pythagorean projection, is still a bottom-tier NBA roster. Regression to expected shot-quality outcomes on both ends could recover a few points per game in margin, potentially nudging a projected win total toward the high twenties. Close-game luck normalizing from 16.7% to something near 50% could add another two or three wins on its own.
The honest projection for a variance-neutral version of this Nets team is something like 28 to 30 wins. Still a lottery team. Still losing more nights than not. But meaningfully less historically bleak than 20-62.
The Nets were bad. They were also, by every available metric, profoundly unlucky. Both things coexisted for 82 games, and the combination produced a season that even the math couldn't fully explain.