The Brooklyn Nets are struggling through the 2024-2025 season, sitting at 11-17, a half-game behind the Detroit Pistons for the final spot in the play-in tournament. The team’s management did not help matters when it traded away the Nets third-leading scorer on December 15. German-born 12-year veteran Dennis Schröder was shipped to the Golden State Warriors — a team fighting for playoff position in the West.
Schröder was averaging 18.4 points per game in 33.6 minutes at the time of the trade. The Nets received three future second-round draft picks along with guards De’Anthony Melton and Reece Beekman in exchange for Schröder, but the trade is not sitting well with the teammates he left behind. The team’s top scorer, Cam Johnson, said this week that the uncertainty created by the trade has had a negative impact on player morale.
Schröder Trade Still Felt in Nets Locker Room
Pointing out that for an NBA team to succeed requires that players “buy-in and take pride in what you’re doing, Johnson added, “the best way to achieve success on a team level is when that buying and that pride is at an all-time high. There’s a lot that gets in the way of it on a professional level and one of those things can be uncertainty of your future. Whether it’s yourself getting traded, whether it’s your teammates getting traded.”
The Nets have played three games since losing Schröder to the trade, winning one and losing two. The lone victory came against the Toronto Raptors who at 7-21 own the NBA’s third-worst record.
But there’s one figure in the Schröder trade drama who was not buying the Nets’ tale of woe over losing the veteran — and that was Schröder’s six-year-old son, Dennis Schröder Jr., who apparently has the ability to see the Nets for what they actually are.
Dennis Schröder Jr., Age 6, Offers Opinion on Trade
“My wife told him that we got traded, and he asked, ‘Where we going?'” the elder Schröder recounted at a press conference last week, following the trade. “And we said Golden State, and he was like, ‘Oh, we’re lucky now, at least it’s a good team,’ That was the first thing, and I had to laugh and I was in a bad mood.”
Schröder Sr., who is 31 years old, added that his young son is “a Steph Curry fan,” so he was naturally delighted that his father became a teammate of Curry’s as a result of the trade.
“He watches every game, all he does is basketball and he’s going to be thrilled to see him,” Schröder Sr. continued, reflecting on his son’s reaction to the trade. “Even yesterday when I came in, he was like ‘Was Steph Curry there?’ I was like, ‘You’re not going to ask me how I’m doing?'”
Curry, for his part, had his own message for Schröder. In the newly acquired Warrior’s debut, Golden State could not get anything going and was crushed by the Memphis Grizzlies in a stunning 51-point defeat, 144-93. At one point in the fourth quarter, Curry according to a report by NBC Sports Bay Area approached his newest teammate and reassured him, “This ain’t what you’re going to expect every night.”
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Six-Year-Old Son of Dennis Schröder Cooks His Dad’s Former Team After Big Trade