Nets

Julius Randle is headed back to New York, although he will be playing in a different borough this time around.

The Brooklyn Nets acquired the 12-year veteran after he spent the past two seasons with the Minnesota Timberwolves, multiple media outlets reported Monday night.

As part of the three-team deal, Minnesota will send Randle and the 28th pick in Tuesday’s draft to Brooklyn in exchange for the Nets’ No. 33 overall pick. In addition, Brooklyn will send veteran center Nic Claxton to the Chicago Bulls. The Timberwolves will receive Mo Gueye from Chicago but are expected to waive the third-year forward.

For Minnesota, the trade creates a $33 million trade exception as well as financial flexibility to seek free agents to play alongside superstar Anthony Edwards. Later on Monday, the Timberwolves came to terms with guard Ayo Dosunmu on a five-year, $112 million deal to remain with the team after being acquired from Chicago at the trade deadline.

Randle goes from a team that won 49 games in each of the last two seasons and three playoff series during that stretch to one that won just 20 games last year and a combined 78 over the last three seasons.

The Nets, who haven’t had a representative in the All-Star Game since Kevin Durant in 2022, will continue rebuilding with the No. 6 overall pick in the 2026 draft to go with the first-rounder they received from Minnesota.

The Lakers drafted Randle at No. 7 overall in 2014, with his first two NBA seasons coinciding with the final two of Lakers legend Kobe Bryant. After becoming a free agent in 2018, Randle played one season with the New Orleans Pelicans before becoming a three-time All-Star during five seasons with the New York Knicks.

In October 2024, Randle went to Minnesota as part of the deal that brought Karl-Anthony Towns to New York. Towns was a key member of the Knicks team that defeated the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals and celebrated with a championship parade in Lower Manhattan last week.

During the 2025 postseason, Randle shook his reputation for fading in the playoffs, crediting his perseverance to a mentality instilled in him many years earlier by Bryant.

“I had a great mentor in Kobe that didn’t necessarily let me pout or get down on myself,” Randle said after scoring a career playoff high of 31 points during a conference semifinal game against Golden State. “His thing was always, ‘All right, what’s next? How can you get better? How can you improve?’ So I always just kind of took that mentality with me.”

While Randle hasn’t publicly commented on the trade, his wife Kendra posted a video to her Instagram Story of 9-year-old son Kyden, the oldest of their three children, stating that he’s “so excited” and “so happy” to be returning to New York.

“@brooklynnets fans he really wanted to make this,” Kendra Randle wrote as a caption to the video.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

For more than 2,000 years, fishermen in Israel’s Sea of Galilee were famous for using nets to catch St. Peter’s Fish, a form of tilapia with a biblical backstory. Now these anglers have gained new notoriety, helping keep some Israeli troops safe from Hezbollah first-person view (FPV) kamikaze drones. TWZ was among the first to highlight the danger these weapons have posed to Israeli forces in southern Lebanon and how the IDF was racing to install passive defenses, including nets, on its combat vehicles for protection.

The threat is so great and countermeasures so far limited, that some IDF troops are resorting to obtaining nets on their own from fishermen for protection, a senior IDF official confirmed to TWZ on Monday. The issue was first reported by Israel’s KAN public broadcasting network. This is in addition to netting the IDF itself is working to procure, which we will talk more about later in this story.

“Indeed, IDF soldiers are equipping themselves with fishing nets, most of which are being purchased in the city of Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee,” a senior IDF official told us. The troops are also buying nets from fishermen at Akko and Haifa on the Mediterranean, the official added.

“The drone threat has become a nightmare for the fighters on the ground,” the high-ranking official explained.

Fishing on the Sea of Galilee! Joshua Aaron / Rather Be in the Galilee

In our past reporting, we explained that the idea behind netting is that drones will get caught up in these barriers and become disabled, or, in some cases, the nets will help keep the drones far enough from the troops or equipment before exploding to keep personnel within the vehicles from being killed.

Israel, as we have previously noted, started using netting on vehicles and other equipment as the FPV threat grew.

You can see one example of this in the following video.

The use of nets as a defensive measure was first employed in Ukraine as FPV drones became the ubiquitous weapon of choice for both sides.

You can see an early example of Russians using netting in the video below.

In our initial stories about Hezbollah’s FPV arsenal, we noted that the Iranian-backed proxy group was adding a challenge to the IDF by increasing the percentage of FPV drones guided by fiber optic cables. These wires mitigate the effect of electronic warfare efforts to jam radio signals as well as some of the limitations imposed by geographical features that can impede the line-of-sight radio connection between drone and operator.

Videos of these attacks began to emerge online last month, which you can see below.

Now there’s a new problem for Israel to solve when it comes to FPV drones. Hezbollah has begun using thermal cameras on these munitions so they can be deployed in night attacks, the IDF official told us. Thermal cameras register heat signatures, turning them into thermal images using differences in temperature.

By adding thermal cameras to the FPV drone, Hezbollah “severely restricts [our] movement both during the day and at night,” he postulated.

Combined with fiber-optic guidance, the use of thermal cameras on FPV drones “creates an extraordinary level of deterrence against the forces operating inside Lebanon and along the border,” the senior IDF official bemoaned. “It is terrifying, dangerous, and frightening in equal measure.”

“The forces are essentially static,” the official added. “They cannot advance toward the drone-launch areas, nor can they effectively target the drone logistics and operational chain extending through the Beqaa Valley, Tyre, Sidon, and even Beirut.”

“Our operational doctrine must change,” he added. “We need to shift from completely exposed operations, where our soldiers become easy targets for Hezbollah, to covert and concealed activity.”

Making matters worse, “the political-security cabinet, and more specifically [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, is pushing for overt operations in order to demonstrate an Israeli presence in southern Lebanon,” the senior IDF official posited. “At the same time, due to commitments and demands made by [U.S. President Donald] Trump, the operational freedom of the forces is being heavily restricted. It is a classic Catch-22 situation.”

“The result is severe harm to our soldiers and a weakening of the IDF against an enemy that is bound by no rules or constraints,” our source continued. “This is a dangerous and absurd asymmetry – sheer recklessness.”

His comments came a day before Netanyahu officially ordered a much larger Israeli push into southern Lebanon, despite the ongoing ceasefire, which you can read more about in our story from earlier today here.

The IDF says about 158,000 square meters of protective nets have already been distributed to units in the field, Israel’s I24 News reported.

“The army says it is in the process of acquiring an additional roughly two million square feet of netting,” the outlet added. “Altogether, the total area ordered is equivalent to roughly 20 football fields, highlighting the scale of Israel’s efforts to adapt its defenses to a rapidly evolving battlefield threat along the northern front.”

Even that much netting does not appear to be enough, given the scope of Israel’s push into southern Lebanon. That may be way some soldiers are looking to fishing nets to fill in the gaps.

Since the war in Ukraine began, troops have done whatever they could, often out of desperation, to develop improvised workarounds to protect against drones, from stacking logs on their vehicles to welding on layers of steel to create so-called “turtle tanks.” These and many other ad-hoc improvements have led to major innovations and a long list of dead-ends. Often times, even simple solutions can be hard to realize due to bureaucracy. Israel’s troops are no different, and their work to find their own solutions is yet another example of even the world’s most capable militaries underestimating and being unprepared for the realities of drones on the modern battlefield.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com