Evidently, a dismal campaign that has seen the Nets fire their coach and general manager while amassing the NBA's fourth-worst record and, with all due respect to newly hired GM Sean Marks, staring down the league's bleakest near-future has changed Johnson's mind. Yes, it is that bad in Brooklyn, and now, Joe Johnson won't be there anymore.
 
From the Nets' Thursday afternoon announcement:
The Brooklyn Nets have requested waivers on Joe Johnson, General Manager Sean Marks announced today.
"The Nets want to thank Joe for his many contributions to the team and the organization," said Marks. "Joe has been a quality professional since joining the Nets four years ago, was a valued member of three playoff teams, and provided many thrilling moments for his teammates and Nets' fans. We wish him much success in the future."
ESPN.com's Marc Stein had reported earlier Thursday that Johnson and the Nets had opened buyout negotiations, just over one month after he reported the 34-year-old guard had "no interest in seeking a buyout." At the time, our Kelly Dwyer wondered if Johnson wasn't just negotiating, looking to ensure that he received as many pennies as possible of his prorated 2015-16 salary — reportedly $24,894,863 in the final season of the mega-max deal he inked with the Atlanta Hawks back in 2010, and the second-richest deal in the league this season, behind only Kobe Bryant — while also hoping to find a soft landing spot in greener, playoff-participating pastures.
In the end, though, Johnson decided it was worth his while to give some money back to get waived by March 1 and be able to catch on with another team in time to qualify for postseason play:
 
Mike Mazzeo
Joe Johnson gave back $3 million on his deal as part of buyout, Sean Marks says #Nets
1:11 PM - 25 Feb 2016
 
devin kharpertian
Marks on Joe leaving $3 million on the table: "That shows that Joe's serious about going to a contender."
1:15 PM - 25 Feb 2016
 
Shortly after the Nets' announcement, Johnson issued a statement via Twitter:
Thank you to all of the Brooklyn and New York Fans for your support during my time with the @BrooklynNets. I want to thank the Nets organization and I wish nothing but the best to the team. I am looking forward to the next chapter of my career and am excited to bring my talents to a new team.
Which new team figures to be topic of great interest over the next two days, as we wait for Johnson to clear waivers on Saturday afternoon. Stein reported that several likely playoff teams have already expressed interest in Johnson's services:
 
• The Hawks, for whom Johnson starred for seven seasons, making six straight All-Star appearances between the 2006-07 and 2011-12 seasons;
• the Boston Celtics, the franchise that drafted Johnson out of Arkansas with the 10th overall pick in the 2001 NBA draft;
• the Cleveland Cavaliers, whose interest in Johnson as a stabiling wing-scoring veteran has been widely reported for some time;
• the Houston Rockets, who now sit a half-game outside the Western Conference's top eight and might stand to benefit from the veteran's shooting and professionalism down the stretch;
• the Miami Heat, whose injury-wracked and shooting-bereft roster could use an infusion of playmaking and marksmanship;
• the Oklahoma City Thunder, who still find themselves in the market for an upgrade over the likes of Dion Waiters, Andre Roberson, Kyle Singler and Anthony Morrow on the wing; and
• the Toronto Raptors, whose hearts Johnson played a pretty big role in breaking during their first-round playoff series two springs back and who could use another big, talented, versatile scorer as they vie with the Cavs for the top spot in the Eastern Conference.
 
Johnson joining the Celtics would be something of a bitter pill for Nets fans to swallow. Boston already owns Brooklyn's 2016 first-round draft pick as a result of the 2013 draft-night deal that sent Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to Barclays Center, and as bad as the 15-42 Nets have been with Johnson thus far, they figure to be even worse without him over the final 25 games of the season. Watching your favorite team potentially sink to the very bottom of the standings, increasing the likelihood that they're going to get a top-three pick in the 2016 draft, only to hand that over to the Celtics, who also now employ one of your former stars, would make an all-around rough deal even harder to take, one would think.
It's also possible, of course, that extracting Johnson's 34 minutes a night might not make too meaningful an on-court difference to the already-cratering Nets, and that adding an about-to-be-35-year-old guard who's shooting 40.6 percent from the field this season and who can't hold up defensively on the wing quite as well as he once did might not necessarily tilt the balance of power in the playoff race in either conference. That said, those who haven't watched Brooklyn much this season — and who can blame you? — might not be aware that Johnson's early-season struggles have turned around quite a bit since the calendar flipped to 2016, during which he's shooting 48.4 percent from the floor, 46 percent from 3 on four attempts per game and 91.5 percent from the charity stripe. In reduced minutes on a team with more talent to ease his creative burden, the savvy 15-year vet may well be able to tilt the math on enough possessions to make a meaningful impact come springtime.
This, to put it mildly, is not exactly what the Nets had in mind when they shipped the Hawks a handful of expiring contracts and a 2017 second-round pick to add Johnson in the summer of 2012. Brooklyn agreed to pick up the final four years and $89 million owed to Johnson with the expectation that he'd be a cornerstone scorer in a star-studded backcourt that would take the pressure off monster center Brook Lopez, exorcise the demons of the franchise's post-Jason Kidd New Jersey tenure, help produce a product buzzworthy enough to pack a brand new building in New York's hottest borough, and reinsert the Nets into the national conversation. It went ... well, it went how it went.
After five years in the lottery, the Nets did make the playoffs in each of their first three seasons in Brooklyn, but never made much noise once they got there. They lost a Game 7 on their home court in the opening round of Year 1. They traded a kings ransom of future draft picks to bring in Pierce and KG to challenge the Big Three Miami Heat, and paid nearly $200 million in salary and luxury taxes to win one playoff series before bowing out to Miami in five games in Year 2. They watched Kidd and Pierce decamp weeks later, stumbled to a sub-.500 finish and an opening-round loss to Atlanta in Year 3, and now find themselves with absolutely nothing to show for all those assets and all that money. (Except Brook Lopez. He's still here, and he's still good.)
Throughout it all, Johnson mostly did what he was expected to do — take shots, make baskets, grab some rebounds, make some passes, and do it all, for the most part, relatively quietly. He leaves having averaged 14.7 points, 3.8 rebounds and 3.2 assists in 34.5 minutes per game, shooting 43.2 percent from the floor and 37.8 percent from the 3-point arc, in 288 regular-season games, all of them starts, and as the Nets' Brooklyn-era franchise leader in points scored, games played, games started, and minutes played, both in the regular season and in the playoffs. There were times when he was sensational, headlined by those buzzer-beating buckets that led Garnett to start calling him "Joe Jesus," and that earned him a reputation as one of the game's premier late-game shotmakers:
 
John Schuhmann
Joe Johnson has made some big shots in the last 5 years...
1:01 PM - 25 Feb 2016
 
All told, in fact, you can make a pretty decent argument that Joe Johnson, as it stands now, has been the best player in Brooklyn Nets history. That, of course, says more about the way things have gone for the Nets over the last few years than it does about Johnson's own exploits; his exit closes the door on a weird, wildly disappointing and obscenely expensive period in the life of the Nets franchise, giving Brooklyn the chance to commit more fully to finding some hope for the future and giving Johnson a chance to find someplace to play where it really might not be all that bad.