NEW YORK — Brooklyn Nets head coach Jordi Fernandez presumably had his pick of which NBA team he could have been the head coach for given his resume. Fernandez will be a head coach in the league for the first time in his career and according to him, there’s a reason he chose Brooklyn.
“The youth excites me. Like I said before, when you have a young roster — and talented — that means that you’re going to have those guys for a long time,” Fernandez said during his introductory press conference on Wednesday. He takes over a team that had a disappointing 32-50 record this past season, but has some exciting, young players such as Cam Thomas and Noah Clowney.
“So, you can develop them and then, they can perform at their best,” Fernandez said about the benefit of having young players on a roster, especially during the kind of rebuild that the Nets are going through right now. “And they’re here with you, so that’s extremely exciting, the flexibility that we’ll have, the resources that we have, right? We have a first class-owner, we have a first class management group, front office.”
Of the players under contract for next season as of this writing, eight of them will be 28 years old or younger at the beginning of the 2024-25 campaign. Thomas, 22, led the team in scoring last season, averaging 22.5 points per game for a Brooklyn squad that needed someone to step up on the offensive end to help the team win some games.
Also, towards the end of the season, the Nets saw players like Clowney (19), Jalen Wilson (23), and Trendon Watford (23) have some huge performances for Brooklyn. Free-agency will be interesting for the Nets given that younger players like Watford and Lonnie Walker IV (25) are free-agents this summer.
“So, if you put all that together, I think that that’s a perfect recipe for success. Our roster right now will allow us to do, like I said before, a lot of things, like playing fast — which usually allows you to find the best shot — to be very physical, extremely physical in the regular season. And, obviously, like everybody says, we want to be top-10 offensively, top-10 defensively, and with the roster we have, we’ll be able to do that,” Fernandez said.
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