While the future is undecided, the present certainly is. The current group of Nets may be in the mix all season long for dubious distinctions and they have come out of the gate swinging by dropping their first 15 games. The latest was a 10-point road loss to the Portland Trail Blazers on Thanksgiving Eve.

They are two losses away from being lumped into the record books by matching the expansion 1988 Miami Heat and 1999 Los Angeles Clippers. They face the Kings, Lakers and Mavericks next.

“You walk into that locker room and it’s like a morgue in there,” Nets head coach Lawrence Frank said to reporters.

With his head on the chopping block, Frank may need a win in one of those three contests to save his job. He has been teetering for a while and although management realizes that they didn’t leave him much to work with, having zero wins and getting blown out of the building on a nightly basis may be too much to stand pat with.

Since being named interim head coach in January of 2004, Frank has experienced both ends of the spectrum. He set an NBA mark by winning his first 13 games of his coaching career and was named NBA Coach of the Month on four separate occasions (February 2004, April 2004, March 2006 and April 2007). The second longest tenured coach in the Eastern Conference had led the team to four consecutive playoff appearances before the roster began to be broken up by management.

Point guard and team leader Jason Kidd was traded to Dallas in February of 2008 and the Nets were a lottery team for the first time in seven years (34-48). That June, Richard Jefferson was moved and it became apparent that a youth movement was in the works. After missing the playoffs again with the same record, the final straw came when Vince Carter was dealt to Orlando last June.

There is so much hanging in the balance with the Nets. The vagabond franchise hopes to once again pack their bags and make Brooklyn their permanent home. The project at the Atlantic Yards has run into some red tape but the Barclays Center is scheduled to open for the 2011-12 campaign. Owner Bruce Ratner has brought in Mikhail Prokhorov, a Russian businessman with deep pockets, so funding should not pose any problems.

The team is obviously clearing salary cap space to make a run at LeBron James and the rest of the 2010 free agent class. But for any of the elite players to even give the Nets a sniff, ground will have had to be broken in downtown Brooklyn.

Until then, this season cannot end fast enough and it has barely started.

Why the Nets would give up their leading scorer in Vince Carter, a proven NBA commodity who had serious chemistry with Devin Harris and a talented youngster in Ryan Anderson for what they got seems a bit obscene at first.

Sure, Rafer Alston is a talented point guard that showed flashes of brilliance during the playoffs, but the Nets already have a point guard, a good one at that and a more than competent backup in Keyon Dooling that proved during the season that he can be more than an understudy if he has to be. So where does Alston fit? Is Harris going to move to shooting guard to accommodate the loss of Carter? What’s going on here?

The same thing goes for the signing of Tony Battie, who despite being an excellent rebounder off the bench and a trusty veteran, comes in with players like Sean Williams, Josh Boone and cough, Yi Jianlian capable of manning the position and in need of minutes. With that being said, where will he fit in with the Nets?

Courtney Lee however is an interesting player. I think he can definitely be a solid small forward if given about 30 minutes a night and with some more pressure on him. He’s also an excellent three-point shooter that is far more explosive than Bobby Simmons, with much more upside. If he can score a dozen points a game and provide some energy, this trade may not be so bad.

With the drafting of Terrance Williams from Louisville as well, the Nets also continue to get younger and more energetic in addition to having cleared a ton of cap room by trading away high-priced veterans like Jason Kidd, Richard Jefferson and Vince Carter over the past two years.

It’s the end of an era.

But it could be the beginning of something great as well.