Report: Nets on the brink of starting a D-League team in Brooklyn

One general manager of an unaffiliated NBA team said Friday that his team has an unofficial arrangement with an NBA team that owns its D-League team outright.

“You’re almost better off having an arrangement with one team,” the GM said. “The only thing is they’re not using your system. But they weren’t using your system in Fort Wayne, either.”

The Nets, which had a hybrid agreement with the Springfield Armor for three years before the team was sold and moved to Grand Rapids in 2014 — where it became the Pistons’ D-League team — hope to have a new D-League team in place that would play in Brooklyn in 2016, and perhaps on Long Island in subsequent years.

“The goal is to have one next year,” GM Billy King said Friday. “Not having a team [last season], we didn’t use Fort Wayne. We worked with Boston and Maine. The way it worked last year … we timed it so when we had Markel [Brown], we worked it so we could send him to Maine.”

At the time, the Nets sent Brown (as well as Cory Jefferson, who has since been waived) to the Maine Red Claws, operated by the Boston Celtics, as part of the D-League’s “flexible assignment” rule, which basically states that if Fort Wayne — the “hybrid affiliate” of roughly a dozen teams — has more than four NBA players on its roster, that players can be sent elsewhere. It’s a complicated rule that requires a franchise to send its players somewhere that doesn’t teach their franchise tenets.