Brooklyn’s Next Nets: Was Noah Clowney’s season a disappointment?

Noah Clowney joined the playoff-hungry Brooklyn Nets as an 18-year-old taken toward the end of the first round, a “project” that wasn’t going to get project-type minutes out the gate. A year later, he wasn’t quite the face of the franchise, but its only emblem.

He had parlayed solid, definitionally under-the-radar G League time into two weeks of exhilarating NBA flashes. We may have jumped the gun, but Brooklyn hadn’t seen a non-Kevin Durant player who could block shots and hit threes since, um, 38-year-old Uncle Cliffy?

Here was Clowney, doing that and more at 19 years old, the sole bright spot at the end of a miserable 2023-24. Then, the Nets made some rearrangements, and Clowney was the…