Still No Deal for Porter, and Camp Is Running Out of Time to Care

The Porter extension story has now outlasted two of my notes on it, and the situation hasn't moved. As of this week, Porter and agent Mark Bartelstein remain at an impasse with the Nets over terms — the full four-year, $234 million he's eligible for was never the realistic number, but what the realistic number actually is hasn't been settled either.

The longer this drags, the more it colors everything else Brooklyn is trying to build. Julius Randle is here, Keon Ellis is here on his two-year deal, Day'Ron Sharpe is locked in. The front office spent the summer addressing the scoring depth problem that left Porter carrying 23.8 points a night last season with nobody close behind. All of that work exists in a kind of holding pattern until the franchise knows whether its centerpiece is staying on a long commitment or playing out the year with his future unresolved.

The practical concern is focus. Training camp is where rotations get set and habits form, and a star forward negotiating his future in the background is a distraction even when everyone insists it isn't. Brooklyn went 20-62 last season. They don't have margin for a fractured camp.

My read: this gets done before the regular season, because neither side benefits from it bleeding into October. But "before October" is close, and every day it sits unsigned is another day the Nets can't fully answer the question Randle raised when he arrived — whether this group is actually going to shock anybody.