The title here is a prediction for just this year while they carry the dead weight of Durant's contract, but the consensus after upgrading their starting PG spot to Kyrie Irving is contention for a top 4 seed in the East. It sounds reasonable on its face, as the Nets were the 6 seed last season and just improved with a coveted free agent. There are two major caveats though.
1. The easy and obvious one is that the Nets were a very weak 6 seed, with only 3 more wins than the 10 seed and 1 more than the 8.
2. Their neutral point differential was driven by their bench squad plus their outgoing PG. The largest season to season moves in the NBA are where a positive player replaces a negative one, positive replacing positive leads to smaller moves, and the bench has been broken up. If you strip out the players who are moving on except for Russell (as a place holder for Irving) the remaining players had a +/- of -2.8 in 1,500 possessions, a mark that would have tied them for 25th in the league last season.
If we take that number at face value and assume that Kyrie plays 2,400 mins, or about 60% of BRK's PG mins and what would be his 2nd highest of the past four seasons, then he will have to play at a +3.9 pp/100 level above Russell's production to bring that team back to even and a roughly 0.500 squad.
Last season Russell was +3.5 better than Dinwiddie on the court (ie Russell on and Dinwiddie off vs Dinwiddie on and Russell off), and Dinwiddie's plus minus over the past three seasons would put him as a plus player, though his two positive seasons his numbers were boosted by a fairly low level of play. Using him as a neutral placeholder seems reasonable for this exercise right now. Roughly speaking Kyrie would have to be a +7.4 level player to drag the remenants of last year's Nets team to 0.500.
Over the past three years Kyrie has been a +7.3 or so player over his replacements, though that is pushed up by his final year in Cleveland at +9.1 which was a few injuries ago and a team that spent most of the year without a backup PG. Marcus Smart has been a roughly average, or a little below average, PG in terms of on/off +/- the past 4 years and Rozier below average.
An expectation of a +6 - +6.5 player for Irving sounds realistic, and the gap between him and Russell of 2.5 - 3.0 would be similar to the 2.7 gap between them in RPM, of course I roughly approximated the method RPM uses, so that isn't a surprise and mostly just indicates no major screw ups.
Now the Nets have added a few players, to start DeAndre Jordan is their new, likely starting, center. A big name his +/- productivity has fallen off a cliff since the splitting of LACs lob city. His own numbers are fairly flat but a sudden improvement in FT% has masked a large drop off in his finishing at around the rim. He has the potential for a solid season, but is two years past his last positive season and Kyrie is no Chris Paul either as a passer or on the defensive end.
Wilson Chandler is another addition and is going into his age 32 season. His last two years have been fairly mediocre as a bench wing with above average (for his career) 3pt shooting numbers.
Due to the disastrous history of the Nets they have little in the way of young talent on the verge of breaking out. LeVert and the recently acquired Prince are both still on their rookie contracts but are also both entering their age 25 season, RHJ's was recently not tendered the QO and Dinwiddie will be 26 this season. This leaves Jarrett Allen as their primary hope for a boost, and his defensive numbers last season were atrocious. With a 7'5" wingspan and good athletic ability he has the potential to improve on that season, but betting that it will happen specifically this year would be optimistic.
There are combinations of events that could push this team into the top 4 in the East, great health especially from Kyrie, Jordan fighting off decline or one of Allen or Prince really finding themselves as a defender, but the odds are that either enough of these won't happen or they are offset by down years elsewhere (Joe Harris not shooting 47% from 3 for example) that they are more likely to be in the 6,7,8 range of the playoffs than the 1-5 spots.
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