Nets attend former top-10 draft bust workout: Could he be a worthwhile addition?

Killian Hayes, Nets — Credit: Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports

The Brooklyn Nets have more than just Summer League games on their agenda while in Vegas. The Nets reportedly attended former Detroit Pistons point guard Killian Hayes’s workout in Las Vegas on Monday, 7/15. Could the soon-to-be 23-year-old be a worthwhile addition?

Killian Hayes has begun his NBA career as a huge bust

Hayes, the seventh-overall pick in the 2020 NBA Draft, has failed massively to live up to his draft billing. Over his four-year career, he’s averaged just 8.1 points, 2.9 rebounds, and 5.2 assists per game on 38.2% shooting and 27.7% from three. He’s only had one season in which he averaged more than 6.9 points per game, which was 2022-2023. Last year, he put up a career-best 41.3% field goal percentage, but still shot sub-30% from beyond the arc and only averaged 6.9 points per game.

At 6-foot-5, Hayes is a tall, lengthy natural point guard who has struggled to shoot consistently at the NBA level. On the defensive end, he’s fared better where his length and athleticism have allowed him to be a positive. Still, his offensive deficiencies have torched any shot he’s had at being a productive player to this point.

Why should the Nets be interested?

Despite all those shortcomings, the Nets are still interested for some solid reasons. First and foremost, the team needs guards. While the Nets have a variety of young players to develop at the forward and center positions such as Noah Clowney, Dariq Whitehead, Jalen Wilson, Trendon Watford, and Day’Ron Sharpe, to name a few, the only young guard on the roster is Cam Thomas. Keon Johnson is making a bid to join Thomas as a young, developmental guard, but neither of those two are natural point guards. The only natural point guards on the team are veterans Dennis Schroder and Ben Simmons, both of whom are on expiring contracts.

Adding Hayes would give them another option as a primary ball handler, something that is especially important given Ben Simmons’s lengthy injury history even though he is currently 100% healthy. Not only would the potential addition give the team depth to withstand an injury, it could also open up deadline deals for Simmons or Schroder to stockpile more assets while not leaving the point guard cupboard bare.

Lastly, Hayes is still very young. It’s unlikely he will reach the ceiling that made him the seventh overall pick, but the Nets don’t need that from him. They didn’t draft him seventh overall and instead would be signing him for a minimum-type deal. At that level of investment, and with that draft pedigree, the odds aren’t terrible that you can develop him into a competent player. And even if he bombs spectacularly, the team is not concerned with contending this year making the signing incredibly low risk.

The Nets have been down this path before

When general manager Sean Marks first took the reigns of the franchise in February of 2016, the Nets were in disarray. They finished the season 21-61 and had mortgaged their future a couple of years prior in the ill-fated Paul Pierce/Kevin Garnett trade. Marks’ first order of business that offseason was to bring in young reclamation projects.

Over the next couple of seasons, Marks brought in unknown young players like Spencer Dinwiddie and Joe Harris. He then traded for disappointing second-overall pick D’Angelo Russell. Through these reclamation projects, the Nets’ player development was able to make real strides and build the young castoffs into NBA rotation-caliber players, culminating with a playoff appearance in 2019 which ultimately made Brooklyn an alluring destination for stars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.

In particular, Dinwiddie and Russell are comps for the best-case scenario with Hayes. Dinwiddie was a bigger point guard who also struggled to shoot the basketball. The former second-round pick didn’t have the same draft pedigree as Hayes, but during his initial years in Detroit, he shot just 31.4% from the field while averaging 4.4 points per game. While Nets fans may have a sour taste in their mouths after his second stint with the team, it’s hard to argue that the now 10-year vet who owns a career 13.3 points per game average hasn’t turned into a solid player after the initial flier the Nets took on him.

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Russell, like Hayes, was a highly touted draft pick who admittedly produced much better during his first couple of seasons. Still, he struggled with efficiency and maturity in his initial run with the Los Angeles Lakers, before developing into a consistent starting point guard with the Nets. He made his only career All-Star appearance with the team in the 2018-2019 season leading Brooklyn to a playoff appearance that same year.

All of that isn’t to say that Hayes will put it all together and reach All-Star status if given the opportunity in Brooklyn, but with nothing to lose and a history of the development of similar players as well as a positional need on the roster, it makes a ton of sense to make the low-risk high-upside play of bringing him in and giving him a shot during a season in which player development is the only goal.