Coaching Is Nets Anti-Tank Variable
The Nets haven’t won often this season, but to the significant segment of fans who are rooting for the team to tank for the benefit of marginally better odds in the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery, each win is still too often.
The Nets “blew” an opportunity to take sole possession of the league’s fifth-worst record by defeating the LeBron James-less Lakers, 111-108, on Monday night in front of a split crowd at Barclays Center. Instead, Brooklyn (22-42) settled into a tie with Philadelphia for the 6/7 odds, with Toronto still in fifth by a half-game.
As I’ve mentioned all season, professional athletes can’t tank. This is their livelihood. With every rep on video, bad ones can negatively affect a player’s earning potential.
Coaches, especially those in their first season like Brooklyn’s Jordi Fernandez, are also hard-wired to try to win every game. Nets General Manager Sean Marks has the power to rein in Fernandez’s intentions, but it doesn’t appear that’s been the case here. Fernandez continues to play those who he thinks gives his team its best chance to win any particular game.
If the coach was in on the tanking mission, he would, for instance, find some reason to avoid playing veterans like Cam Johnson, D’Angelo Russell, and Nic Claxton in the final minutes of close games. Fernandez, though, wouldn’t hear of it. Johnson and Russell each made big shots in the final two minutes to help the Nets stave off a pair of 30-foot desperation three-pointers by the Lakers.
In a show that he means business, Fernandez pulled Keon Johnson, the birthday boy who dropped 18 points on 6-for-10 shooting (including 3-of-4 from deep) through three quarters, a little more than a minute after reinserting him with about five minutes remaining in the contest. In his short run, Johnson committed a bad turnover and fouled a three-point shooter, which allowed Los Angeles to cut its deficit to two points. Tyrese Martin immediately took Johnson’s spot to close the game.
After Luka Doncic’s three-pointer with 11 seconds remaining again cut the Lakers’ deficit to two points, Fernandez called a timeout so the Nets could advance the ball to halfcourt. The ensuing sideline out of bounds play was executed to perfection. Noah Clowney set a screen and slipped to the basket and Ziaire Williams’ pass was on the money for an and-1 dunk that restored Brooklyn’s five-point lead.
Perhaps the key segment in the game was the latter half of the third quarter, when Fernandez had five subs on the floor to face Doncic. Even with all the Lakers injuries—besides James, they were missing Rui Hachimura, Jaxson Hayes, and former Net Dorian Finney-Smith—this had “Danger Zone” written all over it.
Except the Nets’ bench matched the Lakers point-for-point, running a functional offense that created quality three-point looks. In the last three minutes of the period, the Nets made four consecutive three-pointers, including one by two-way player Reece Beekman, who had misfired on 23-of-27 such attempts this season entering the contest. That particular stretch had Lakers Head Coach J.J. Redick seething in his chair at his postgame press conference, lamenting those and other “shortcuts his club took in the loss.
Doncic, meanwhile, headed to the bench with his club down by two points and, despite playing through pain in his back, was only afforded a 2:23 respite.
Fernandez’s defensive game plan called for full-scale blitzes to get the ball out of Doncic’s hands. These were harder than the ones the Nets have previously utilized in their standard pick-and-roll coverage. Such aggressiveness carries risks, and Doncic made the Nets pay to the tune of 12 assists and numerous hockey assists created by his pocket passes out of the double teams. Still, between the annoyances from the waves of arms in his face and his constant whining about the officiating (some of which was valid, most others over the top), he was clearly frustrated, needing 26 shots to get to 22 points while coughing up the ball five times.
Obviously, coaching isn’t all that matters, otherwise Brooklyn wouldn’t need to go on average three games to get one win. The Nets choked away a winnable game on Saturday in Charlotte, surrendering a 12-0 run over the final 3:15 in a 105-102 defeat. It wasn’t Fernandez’s finest moment.
Remember the old days when Nets fans debated the wisdom of playing Claxton and Ben Simmons together? Well, it seems like ages ago, even if it’s really been only one month since Simmons was waived. In any event, the stats and the eye test were clear in concluding that Brooklyn’s offense went into the toilet when the two non-shooters shared the floor.
The reverse is now in play, with Brooklyn hemorrhaging points when Cam Thomas, who sat out Monday’s game as part of his load management for his prior hamstring injury, and Russell are paired in the backcourt. Not that the duo’s defense was directly responsible for Saturday’s late-game collapse (Russell couldn’t contain Charlotte’s voracious big Moussa Diabate on a putback after a switch and Thomas’ inability to contain the dribble forced help that led to an open three-point look, but everyone was culpable in that debacle), but here’s a stat to monitor going forward: Among those on the Nets current roster, their worst defensive two-man lineups that have played at least 70 minutes together this season are:
Williams/Thomas (125.6 defensive rating)
Russell/Thomas (123.7 defensive rating)
Russell has only been a Net since arriving in the December 29 Finney-Smith trade and thanks to Brooklyn’s injury plague, the above sample size is too small to be definitively reliable. However, like with Claxton/Simmons, it does make sense. Thomas and Russell are both smallish guards who lack the physicality and foot speed to be consistently effective NBA defenders. You might be able to get away with one such weak link that a quality opponent will target in crunch time, but two is a death trap.
The reason I am putting this out here is that Fernandez to date seemed to be configuring his rotation to maximize their shared time while their minutes were restricted. Maybe the organization is using the last quarter of the season to acquire data points for the offseason, when both Thomas (restricted) and DLo (unrestricted) will be free agents. Can the duo coexist on the floor over the long haul? Fernandez is no dummy; he had to have doubts, which means we should have been seeing more staggering of their minutes to increase the team’s win probability.
That he hasn’t could give the pro-tankers hope that maybe Fernadez will eventually opt to take a longer look at some of the younger players like Dariq Whitehead, Maxwell Lewis, and Beekman while putting his core on ice, results be damned.