Robert jackson bennett

If it is any consolation to Billy King, his 2013 trade with the Boston Celtics for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett does not yet rank as the worst Nets trade in the pockmarked history of the franchise. Nor is it the most lucrative heist the storied Celtics have ever pulled.

On both accounts, give it time. Three years, in fact, offer plenty for the Celtics to draft their way back to N.B.A. prominence, courtesy of King, the Nets’ general manager, and his Russian-financed court.

Before we discuss the particulars, it is interesting to note that the chronically lowly Nets long ago had a strange and complicated relationship with the Celtics, the league’s most title-rich organization (17). The Nets, who have won no titles, once installed a Celtics-staple parquet floor in their New Jersey Meadowlands arena, hopefully laying the groundwork for upward mobility.

This was no imitative coincidence. In the early 1980s, when the league was rife with conflicts of interest on both sides of the management-labor divide, a man named Alan Cohen seemed to hold sway over both franchises, having made the executive rounds from the Knicks to the Nets to the Celtics.

Some in the Nets’ organization were convinced that their unremarkable ensemble of North Jersey owners was consulting the influential Cohen on team matters even as he served as vice chairman of the Celtics’ board.

With that in mind, there was a déjà vu feel to the weekend, as the Atlantic Division rivals split a home-and-home series, the Nets absorbing a 25-point pounding Friday night in Boston before holding off a Celtics rally to win their third game of the season Sunday at Barclays Center.

All these years later, here are the Nets, fleeced of their immediate future by Danny Ainge, the Celtics’ president for basketball operations, in the position of trying to do to some unsuspecting franchise pretty much what Ainge did to them: obtain precious assets for a roster overrun with the aged or undistinguished.

Good luck with that. At least Ainge, when he set about rebuilding the Celtics, had the stellar reputations of Pierce and Garnett to peddle. Zealously determined to take Brooklyn by storm and pound a stake in the heart of Knicks territory, the Nets handed him three first-round draft picks and the right to swap a fourth.

Unloading two fading veterans with one contract dump, Ainge considered the possibility that the spirit of Red Auerbach had temporarily seized King’s mind.

In King’s defense, he was operating under a five-year championship guarantee made by the very rich Russian Mikhail D. Prokhorov when Prokhorov assumed majority ownership of the team. Indefensible was King’s failure to protect the picks, as many are protected in such trades, in the event that they landed in lottery position.

He never imagined the Nets falling this far so fast, which he absolutely should have. In a nutshell, all they reaped from the deal with Pierce and Garnett was one playoff-round victory (Toronto, 2014) and a solid starting forward in Thaddeus Young (acquired from Minnesota last season for Garnett).

In a recent interview with Boston reporters, King acknowledged that the Nets had gambled and lost, while contending that Pierce and Garnett had produced intangible benefits.

“What they brought in culture and character, with Paul for one year and K.G. for a year and three-quarters, is something that will help this franchise down the road for a long time,” he said.

Then King essentially refuted his own argument by admitting the Nets were back in rebuilding mode — right where they were during the end days in New Jersey — and in the process of renovating a costly roster widely perceived to be short on character.

“Now we’re focusing on trying to gain younger assets, as we did this year, and we’ll keep doing that,” he said.

Might King manufacture a draft pick for Joe Johnson’s expiring contract? Should he determine what Brook Lopez would bring on the trade market? The accompanying hope that the Nets might spend their way back to respectability or better with nearly $40 million in salary-cap space next summer may be wishful thinking with the cap drastically rising for everyone because of the league’s new television deal.

Competing for a limited number of impact free agents who are expected to continue the trend of moving for better odds of winning will not be easy, as Phil Jackson and the Knicks learned last summer.

So where might that leave the Nets? They are without their pick in 2016, bound to swap the lesser of the two with Boston’s in 2017 and pickless again in 2018. They have lately been more competitive but figure to be one of the five worst teams. Given bleak prospects for dramatic improvement, or youthful investment, the case could be made that they are the N.B.A.’s saddest story, as even Philadelphia (0-15) has youth and picks upon which to wish.

Ainge’s Celtics are only the epitome of a nice, overachieving team in search of a linchpin star. Should they procure one or, better yet, two from the three Nets picks via draft or trade, the deal would deserve to be mentioned alongside acquiring Bill Russell’s draft rights from St. Louis in 1956 or landing Robert Parish and Kevin McHale in the same trade with Golden State in 1980.

No team knows better than Boston that draft-related deals are risky, too. Auerbach thought he had a steal in 1986 when he sent Gerald Henderson, a solid guard whose best days were behind him, to Seattle for a first-round pick, which wound up No. 2 in the draft. The Celtics took Maryland’s Len Bias, who died two days later after using cocaine.

But that was a singular event, one shot tragically lost. Barring rapid improvement by the Nets, this time there are likely to be three.

Is the deal destined to be the Nets’ worst, more everlastingly scarring than the selling of Julius Erving to Philadelphia upon their 1976 entry into the N.B.A. from the folding A.B.A.?

Hard to say, but at least the Nets have come a long way across four decades. Though still losers, they at least are now buyers.

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On Wednesday, residents in Montana saw a mysterious object — a balloon — hovering and bobbing around in the skies. The enigma brought Americans out to squint at the heavens, caused a diplomatic visit to be canceled and opened a political debate.

How did a balloon end up kindling such tension between Washington and Beijing?

On today’s episode

Background reading

• The Chinese balloon drifted for seven days across the United States. Here’s a timeline of events .

• The balloon was brought down by an air-to-air missile fired at it off the coast of South Carolina.

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Edward Wong

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