An All-NBA Third Team center, 22 years old, whose market has gone quiet since July 1 — and the team that just traded away its only credentialed rim anchor hasn't been linked to him once.

Jalen Duren posted 19.5 points and 10.5 rebounds on 65 percent shooting this past season, made the All-Star Game, finished 11th in DPOY voting, and earned All-NBA Third Team honors. He is 22 years old. And as of late July, he does not have a contract.

Brooklyn, meanwhile, has not been linked to him once.

That asymmetry is worth examining. In June, Duren was angling for a sign-and-trade to Sacramento, per Sean Corp at Detroit Bad Boys. The Lakers also met with him. Neither deal materialized. By July 1, Corp's headline read flatly: "Jalen Duren's market has disappeared." Three weeks later, as of July 23, his situation remained unresolved — Corp framing the continued stalemate as, essentially, fine for Detroit.

Fine for Detroit is one read. The Pistons hold Duren's Bird rights as his former team, and as a restricted free agent they can match any offer sheet Brooklyn or anyone else might send. That's the structural friction the Reddit fan base keeps running into when they argue the Nets should be on the phone: you can't sign Duren away from Detroit. You need Detroit's cooperation in a sign-and-trade, which means sending back real assets — picks, players, cap ballast — for a player the Pistons have no obvious incentive to move.

But "market has disappeared" changes the calculus. A player whose Sacramento path went cold, whose Lakers flirtation went nowhere, and who has now sat unsigned into late July is a player whose leverage is eroding. Detroit holding firm may mean they genuinely believe they can re-sign him on their terms — or it may mean they're watching the negotiating clock run out on their own restricted free agent.

Brooklyn's position makes the ask more urgent than it might look. The Nets sent Nic Claxton to Chicago for Julius Randle in the draft-night reshuffling. Claxton was the team's only credentialed rim protector — the one piece of defensive infrastructure that survived the Durant era. Randle does not play center. Mikel Brown Jr. is the long-term answer at the five, and everything out of Summer League suggests he's ready to grow into it. But Brown Jr. is a rookie, and the league doesn't wait for development timelines.

Duren is what Nets fans want Brown Jr. to become in the most optimistic scenario — a true paint anchor who rebounds, protects the rim, and finishes at an elite clip inside. The difference is that Duren is already that, right now, at 22, on a contract that would almost certainly be structured around max money given his All-NBA designation.

Sean Marks said this month he's not in a rush. The Demin–Brown Jr. rebuild is real, and protecting draft capital makes sense for a team that went 20-62. But the Claxton hole hasn't been filled, and an All-NBA center who can't find a market is not a situation that recurs often. The question Brooklyn fans are asking — loudly, on every Nets forum with a pulse — isn't irrational. It's whether Marks is making a deliberate call or simply hasn't made the call at all.

At 65 percent from the field and 10-plus rebounds a night, Duren is priced into exactly the kind of market that has gone quiet around him. That's either a signal nobody else sees yet — or the one Sean Marks is choosing to ignore.