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.