Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai is confident in the franchise’s future

• The Brooklyn Nets made great strides last season by securing an unexpected playoff berth and respect from minority owner Joe Tsai.

A regular season record of 42-40 was enough to return the Brooklyn Nets to the NBA Playoffs for the first time since 2015 and seemingly secure the team’s management for the foreseeable future. General Manager Sean Marks and head coach Kenny Atkinson were the subjects of conversation during a recent press conference featuring team minority owner Joe Tsai.

Tsai, who currently serves as the full owner of the WNBA’s New York Liberty spoke to reporters Thursday night, before the Liberty’s Barclays Center debut in Brooklyn against the women’s Chinese national team. He was asked about his role as owner of the Nets and the type of involvement he will have moving forward as the franchise prepares for free agency. Empire Writes Back was on hand for Tsai’s full address of the media.

"“What I think is important as the owner is to encourage and allow a positive culture, a sustainable winning culture to develop within the organization. That means bringing in the right people in terms of front office, coaching staff and performance staff so that your players…feel like their entire life both on and off the court can be taken care of, that there’s someone there to pay attention to it.”"

It appears the right people are Atkinson and Marks are creating the winning culture on a team that sported terrific young talent. All-Star D’Angelo Russell, Spencer Dinwiddie, and Caris LeVert just to name a few, that have raised their games tremendously. Atkinson is currently a finalist for the Rudy Tomjanovich award as NBA coach of the year. Tsai would continue his praise of the Nets basketball operations tandem talking about the team’s strong bond.

"“Building a winning culture, the first thing is you want to make players work with each other as a team so that there is a real positive locker-room culture, It’s not that easy to put together that kind of cohesive locker-room culture. As the owner, the best thing I can do is allow that to happen. I alone will not be able to do what Sean and Kenny and our performance staff are doing”"

Tsai will be seeking full control of the Nets from majority owner Mikhail Prokhorov by no later than 2021 and already may be interested in retaining their nucleus. Brooklyn will look to add plenty of big names this offseason so the vote of confidence in team staff should help in the negotiation process.