Win-Now Nets May Need to Cut Losses It was all smiles for Jason Kidd, Mikhail Prokhorov and Billy King this summer before things turn a drastic turn for the Nets. EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - It may be futile when one is chased by a shark in deep water to question the decision to have gone swimming in the first place. But regret is a common human experience, and so it is fair to wonder if Billy King is feeling any as his master plan for winning an N.B.A. championship appears to have fractured like the fifth metatarsal in Brook Lopez's right foot. Will there be a time - like right now - when he might have to admit that the Nets" daring mission to win at all costs has become an unmitigated failure and that the best option is to at least explore reversing course? "Not at this point," King, the Nets" general manager, said Sunday at the team's practice facility. We're not there. Where King and the Nets are after losing Lopez, their center and leading scorer, for the season is even more apparent than when they were beaten at the buzzer in overtime in Philadelphia on Friday night and slunk off the floor with a 9-17 record. X-rays taken afterward revealed Lopez's third fracture of the same foot, adding gloom to distress around a franchise that had such a celebratory summer - which, unfortunately, is when projected success is worth the paper it is printed on. This is not meant to second-guess the deal that brought Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to Brooklyn, because many folks in the news media gallery - myself included - thought it was a splendid idea, the cost of draft picks notwithstanding. The problem has turned out to be less with the former Celtics than with Lopez and Deron Williams, whom they were brought in to support. Lopez, 25, may be following the career path of Yao Ming, who, like Lopez, was a picture of health for his first three N.B.A. seasons before foot problems derailed him. Williams, 29, seemed like the ideal point guard to build a team around when the Nets acquired him in early 2011, but he has proved fragile, less than the sum of his talented parts. Even fully healthy, the Nets" foundational pieces are good, not great, and that has had a diminishing effect on everyone else in their splurge of roughly $183 million (including payroll taxes). "Oh, we got plenty of guys that can play the 5 and the 4," Jason Kidd, the rookie coach, said of the center and power forward positions that must now be restructured. Noting that he finally had Andrei Kirilenko on the practice court as the Nets prepared for the Indiana Pacers on Monday night in Brooklyn, Kidd added, "This team was built for depth." Not surprisingly, depth became the post-Lopez mantra, and in a conference as forgiving as the N.B.A."s Eastern, the Nets - again, on paper, worth the change in the pocket of their owner, Mikhail D. Prokhorov - should still have enough talent to contend for the playoffs. Having spent so much of Prokhorov's money, they could add another frontcourt player, like the disgruntled Houston center Omer Asik, a better defender than Lopez but offensively inept. "When you get an injury like this, everybody calls you," King said. There's no imminent deal. We're not going to panic. That would obviously be the owner's prerogative, even if everything the Nets have done, all the No. 1 picks they have traded for a 9-17 team, can be traced to Prokhorov's introductory promise to produce a championship in relatively short order, or at least to arrive in Brooklyn with a team to be reckoned with. The alternative path would have been to recognize that the novelty of Barclays Center would have given the Nets a two- to three-year window to build from the ground up. They might have let the Knicks continue to overspend, mortgage their future and deflate their fan base. But Prokhorov gave King the green light and the cash to out-Knick the Knicks. The acquisition of Williams was presumably a response to the Knicks" trade for Carmelo Anthony. The sacrifice of their 2012 draft position to Portland (hello, Damian Lillard) for Gerald Wallace was done to persuade Williams to re-sign, as was the deal for Joe Johnson. If you are scoring and second-guessing at home, forget Pierce and Garnett - go back to the beginning. Whatever King does from here, the odds are that there will come a time when he or his successor will have to turn the Nets from buyers into sellers and start all over again. If there is no turnaround, the Nets will at least have to try to shop some of their expensive pieces come the February trade deadline or during the usual flurry of activity around the college draft in June. They were on the upswing for about a week, winning four of five games, getting healthy. Then they lost to Washington at home and surrendered 121 points to the lowly 76ers, and it no longer seemed like a good idea to brag on how Kidd had changed the defenses of his departed assistant, Lawrence Frank. Having missed the Philadelphia game for personal reasons, Johnson, watching on television, saw Lopez take a fall and grab his foot. He called the trainer, Tim Walsh, after the game and was told the bad news. "I was devastated, man," Johnson said. It seems like we can't catch a break. The word use was unintentional but fateful. Another broken foot for Lopez begets the question, How long before it's time to break up the Nets?