After two-straight buzzer-beaters, one good and one bad, a very fair question to ask coming into this Brooklyn Nets-Washington Wizards contest would’ve been: what does this strange, weird, and cruel basketball team have in store next?

Facing off against another disappointing franchise, albeit one with two stars, should’ve given the Nets reason to believe, but they quickly bent to the will of the speedy John Wall. While Sean Kilpatrick got to work on rookie Shane McClellan, filling in for a hobbled Bradley Beal, scoring 5 points on 2-3 shooting.

And yet, meh.

In fact, the most important thing from the first quarter, in which the Nets chased by 5 or more for the majority of the frame, was this tweet from Greg Logan, a writer at Newsdaily:

https://twitter.com/GregLogan1/status/814988068050583552

While most fans might start daydreaming about Otto Porter Jr. joining the team in free agency, the version in this reality dropped a stupid-simple 10 points and the Wizards ran their lead to 31-23 after one quarter. In a vacuum, it’s been easy to point and laugh at the Nets’ situation — lack of picks, injuries, no stars — but isn’t an accepted rebuild better spent than toiling away in mediocrity?

The Wizards, who should be an Eastern Conference player by all accounts, is just 15-16, even with the addition of head coach Scott Brooks over the summer. With Porter Jr. well on his way towards a max contract and the Beal situation as muddied as ever, the Wizards should be showing more than this — is perpetual disappointment better than occasional excitement?

These are, more or less, nothing but placations, undeniably irrelevant as the Nets racked up 11 first half turnovers and fell behind further with each possession. In fact, if you’re so wonderfully with me until this point, I’d like to personally thank you — when the Nets play like this for 40+ minutes, what are the odds that somebody reads through the end of the six paragraphs about their favorite team’s continued weaknesses on a Friday night? Give me a holler on Twitter if you read this sentence and, I don’t know, I’ll write something nice about you.

I mean, when Trey Burke scores 20 first half points on you, there’s really no coming back from that.

And they didn’t.

I mean, take your pick — was it the 21 turnovers? Or Burke’s 27 points? Maybe the Wizards’ 56.6% from the floor? However you slice this one, the Nets will head into 2017 on a really sour note.