It will be well over a month until Brooklyn even starts training camp, until newly-hired head coach Jordi Fernandez gets a chance to get his hands on his players in earnest.
But talk to Fernandez’s new charges and there are signs of how the Nets are going to play this upcoming season. His plan of attack?
Attack.
“Just playing fast … playing together,” second-year forward Jalen Wilson told The Post. “Playing fast, but knowing what you’re doing as well. I think the intelligence of where you are on the floor and understanding what defenses are in, different things like that all play into it.
“But I think the main part is playing fast, playing confident. Not being out there settling and not being unsure of anything. But everything at full speed and understanding that you’ve got to attack in everything … whether it’s shooting, dribbling, finding the open teammate, running down the floor sprinting to the corner, those different things.”
As befitting a rebuilding team lacking in top-end talent, the Nets hired a rookie head coach in Fernandez who was known for development and defense, and built a staff that fits that ethos.
In games they hope to run and run some more.
That means in practice they’ll have to drill and drill some more.
Their pace is going to have to come from practice; otherwise it’ll just be sloppy and chaotic, rather than effective and dangerous.
“Yeah, I’d say reps,” Wilson said of what the team has been stressing. “Reps in practice, before Summer League, leading up to Summer League, and reps now.
“A lot of it was just up and down drills, being in the right place, doing everything full speed and at high intensity, not taking anything for granted, and just understand that if you slouch in the practice, in the game it won’t be at full speed. And when it’s full speed in the game, you’ve got to be ready and prepared.”
Make no mistake, no amount of preparation is likely to make Brooklyn a contender this season. That window closed the minute they traded away superstar Kevin Durant for Mikal Bridges, and — after a disappointing 32-50 mark last season — was all but padlocked shut when Nets owner Joe Tsai and general manager Sean Marks officially signaled a rebuild by dealing Bridges across the East River to the archrival Knicks.
Getting five first-round draft picks and a first-round swap for a player who has never made the All-Star Game can only be considered a success. It essentially means they turned a 34-year-old who wanted out and two swaps into seven first-round picks, two more swaps, Cam Johnson and the return of the rights to their own firsts in 2025 and ’26. Bleacher Report re-graded the Durant deal an A++++.
What all those picks bring back is a question down the line. In the here-and-now, the Nets will almost certainly be on the struggle bus.
They’re projected to win an NBA-worst 19.5 games this coming season by all major sportsbooks. As the 41-year-old Fernandez starts to lay the foundation for whatever culture he hopes to build, the Spaniard will need to rely on the Nets’ young legs outrunning and outworking older veteran teams.
“We want to play fast, want to play hard,” said second-year pro Noah Clowney, just 20. “We want to be disruptive. We know we’ve got to be a great defensive team if we want any shot at winning games, and that’s just the reality of it. Nobody’s got to sugarcoat that for us. We understand that.
The Nets aren’t going to be able to score their way to wins despite the emergence of young shooting guard Cam Thomas, who averaged a team-high 22.5 points last season. Their offensive rating was just 23rd in the NBA last season, and 25th after interim Kevin Ollie took over during the All-Star break.
Brooklyn will be even more offensively-challenged this coming season with Bridges in the Garden, All-Star point guard Ben Simmons always an injury question mark and veteran forwards Johnson and Dorian Finney-Smith potentially on the trade block at any given time.
The Nets will have to hang their hat on the other end of the floor.
Fernandez is regarded as a top defensive coach, and served as Sacramento’s de facto defensive coordinator under Mike Brown. He helped guide the Kings to a vast improvement on that end, jumping from 24th in defensive rating in 2022-23 to 14th this past season with no significant upgrades to the roster.
Fernandez spent much of the summer coaching Team Canada into the Paris Olympics, where the team went unbeaten in the so-called Group of Death, thanks in large part to its defense, before falling to host France in the quarterfinals earlier this month.
As Brooklyn starts to prepare for next season — as long and arduous as it will likely be — Fernandez has plucked assistants Dutch Gaitley and Deividas Dulkys to come with him from Sacramento. They’ll help him in trying to get these young Nets to take more pride in guarding in one-on-one matchups.
“He wants guys to be more dominant on the ball, taking their matchups more personal,” Keon Johnson said. “And then also relying on the help behind you, knowing that if you do try and gamble or even if you do get beat, you’ve got guys behind you knowing that they’ll make a play behind you.
“[So], winning from a defensive standpoint, just because for me that’s something I hang my hat on, and that’s just something I naturally just watch whenever I get the chance to turn the TV on. So just seeing how he got [Canada] playing defensively and in the system together, I mean, I see it translating over to Brooklyn.”
New addition
Brooklyn added Drew Nicholas to their scouting department, per Hoopshype. The Long Island native had spent the past two seasons as Director of Scouting for the Denver Nuggets.