How Fernandez Has Spurred The Nets To Play Over Their Heads
All five local NBA and NHL clubs were in action on Thanksgiving eve Wednesday. They all lost, except for the team given the lowest odds of winning.
That would be the Nets, projected by Las Vegas in the preseason to be the least in the East. Brooklyn was on its third game in four nights, all in Western Conference cities, facing Championship contender Phoenix, whose Big 3 of Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal were all available.
The Nets, meanwhile, had been ravaged by injuries to the point where many of those who ended up participating were listed as being banged up. You needed one of those old “Who’s Who” books to identify some of their rotation members.
Before the game, the Nets announced that leading scorer Cam Thomas will be “reevaluated in three weeks” due to a left hamstring strain. Starting center and defensive anchor Nic Claxton was taking the night off for back maintenance. His backups Day’Ron Sharpe, out all year with a hamstring issue, and Noah Clowney (ankle) were sidelined as well. Can you spell “punt?”
Head Coach Jordi Fernandez would have none of that talk creeping into the Nets locker room. He plugged in the so-called next man up, two-way player Tyrese Martin, who of course dropped 30 points on unreal 8-for-10 three-point shooting, and Brooklyn smoked the Suns down the stretch to win, 127-117 for their third win in a row. In his previous 21 NBA games, Martin had accumulated 33 total points while shooting 5-for-18 from deep.
Fernandez’s Nets aren’t exactly the talk of the NBA—they’re just 9-10 with more than ¾ of the season to go--but they are getting love from a wider array of pundits who had been certain that Brooklyn was destined for rock bottom this season. A whisper campaign to get Fernandez into the Coach of the Year conversation has begun.
How is this rookie HC doing it? It’s not just a few things, so I’d better get cracking:
1) The buy-in
It started in training camp, which Fernandez admitted was tough in terms of being heavy on conditioning. Though Brooklyn is bereft of true NBA “stars”, such an agenda, particularly from a new coach, could chafe some veterans. The Nets players, to their credit, embraced it, and they have been mostly all-in on playing hard for 48 minutes. The team took a league-low nine charges all last season, per NBA.com. The next lowest total was 16. Brooklyn is up to 13 charges taken already in just 19 games, the NBA’s fifth-most. Even Thomas, who in prior years had often appeared disinterested in basketball items beyond getting up shots, has bought in to the program, showing improved awareness and physicality on defense and playmaking on offense. The compete level also extends to the internal, for Fernandez has shown that he is willing to ride, or sit, players based on production. You can feel the hunger for playing time when you watch guys like Jalen Wilson and Ziaire Williams, who understand that there are others on this roster who are itching to take their minutes should they not meet the standard.
2) The humility
I cop to worrying that this could be a problem area for Fernandez, a Spain native who speaks English well as a second language. Still, he had been known for being direct, sometimes harshly so, which he attributed to a less than full vocabulary. Instead, his public remarks have been rife with humility, protecting his players at all costs, even to the point where he’ll direct the blame card at himself for things like not giving a guy proper rest or a scheming issue. He’ll cite his assistants or others in the basketball operations departments for their contributions to a winning effort. There have been many times where Fernandez could have thrown the mercurial Ben Simmons under the bus to the airport, but he’s been firm in promoting Simmons’ passing and pacing attributes. Though maddeningly inconsistent, Simmons had his best game of the season in Phoenix, putting up a 14/9/8 stat line with just two turnovers in 27 minutes.
3) The defense
NBA.com has the Nets ranked 25th in defensive rating this season, down from 20th in 2023-24. It’s misleading. A year ago, we were all perplexed at how a team with so many highly-regarded defensive players could perform so loosely as a group, especially considering then HC Jacque Vaughn made things fairly simple on most nights with a switch-everything foundation. Fernandez, meanwhile, has had to deal with ever-changing lineups, many times without Claxton, an elite rim protector who has missed six games already and averaged just 24.5 minutes on the nights he was available due to Performance Team restrictions. Yet Fernandez has found ways to mix-and-match with his variably-sized lineups, working in different pick-and-roll coverages (the hedging to different degrees has been a nice wrinkle) besides the switching to keep opponents guessing. Though the defensive rebounding has been affected by all the scrambling, the Nets are forcing more turnovers, improving their percentage ranking per NBA.com from 24th to 14th this season. Here’s another intriguing NBA.com stat: Brooklyn has played nine games in November that have been within five points in the last five minutes. They are surrendering 105.3 points per 100 possessions in such crunch time, good for the seventh-best rating in the league over that period. It’s why they have gone 6-3 in those contests.
4) The smart 3s
Like many coaches in this analytics-driven era, Fernandez wants his club to jack up three-pointers galore. The Nets have taken 40.9 3s per game, the 5th-most in the league this season. The difference, however, is that Fernandez prioritizes generating catch-and-shoots, particularly from the corners. Quantity AND quality—who would have thunk? Not Vaughn—with him, the number 40 was everything. Brooklyn now takes about as many corner 3s per game as Boston with just a fraction of their offensive star power to force help and only three teams get up more catch-and-shoot 3s, per NBA.com. Such deficiencies in shot creation result in more three-point grenades than you’d like to see, but the Nets still rank fourth in the league in three-point percentage at 38.8%. I had them destined for a bottom five finish in that category.
5) The challenges
No one in the league challenges more officials’ calls than Fernandez. No has been right more often either. Whether or not the NBA will admit it, it’s a stars’ league, and they tend to get the friendlier whistle than the pedestrian Nets. Here again, Fernandez has been humble, quick to deflect the credit to assistant coach Connor Griffin, who is in charge of determining within a couple of seconds whether a call should be reviewed. We’ve come a long way from Spencer Dinwiddie prodding Vaughn to waste his challenges on false pretenses.
6) The timeouts
There have been a select few instances where I wished Fernandez was a bit quicker with the timeout trigger, but that’s light years from the obliviousness of the Steve Nash/Vaughn regimes, where opponents’ mini-runs metastasized into game deciders. In general, Fernandez maintains a clear pulse on how his team is performing, halting action when he sees indicators of lapses. A second timeout 52 seconds apart during the third quarter was deemed a critical turning point in Brooklyn’s comeback from 18 points down in Monday’s shocker at Golden State. I don’t have stats as to the effectiveness of Nets’ plays out of timeouts, but the eye test has seen plenty of candy, with Brooklyn often generating good looks off those sets.
7) The belief
I can’t tell you which of the above on this list is most important to the success of an NBA coach, but instilling a sense that there is a purpose to each step in the program ranks highly. Good NBA players want to be coached, but they can quickly gather if the direction they’re hearing doesn’t register as sound. The Nets are playing with a belief that Fernandez’s coaching can allow them to compete with anyone in the NBA. To hell with the experts who had them wallowing in the basement. To hell with all the fans who wished they’d tank for better odds in the 2025 Draft Lottery. From the veterans assumed to be on the trade block to the borderline G League youngsters, they all believe that this season presents an opportunity for individual rewards if they commit to the program. Is Brooklyn’s relative won/loss success to date sustainable? I doubt it, but it sure seems like the franchise finally succeeded in finding a HC who can help rebuild a lost culture.
Excellent column. The Nets and fans could truly enjoy a Happy Thanksgiving giving thanks for the new head coach, their new ethos, and general success.