Tanking has an ugly side, and the Nets are experiencing it right now.
If they plan to grow from this, they can’t let that experience break them. Not letting these losses turn them into losers is coach Jordi Fernández’s task.
Brooklyn enters Thursday’s game against the Magic having dropped nine of their last 10, with some historically ugly non-efforts.
They’ve lost by 54, 53 and 37 points since Jan. 21, only the fourth team in NBA history to suffer multiple 50-point beatings in the same season.
“We’ve got to figure something out,” Nic Claxton told The Post. “This is not basketball. We’re supposed to be NBA basketball players. We shouldn’t be getting beat by that much. We shouldn’t get down by this much.
“So, it’s on everybody. It’s on me. I take responsibility for it, too. I need to be engaged for the whole time when I’m out there. So, yeah, we’ve got to be better.”
Brooklyn has suffered four 50-point losses over the last three seasons, joining Portland from 2021-2024 as the only teams to ever endure such ignominy.
Before the Nets face the Magic on Thursday, they will already have faced the uncertainty of the 3 p.m. trade deadline.
Some players and teams have gotten distracted and disrupted in the past by the looming trade deadline, but Claxton refused to use that as an alibi for Brooklyn’s poor play.
“No. It’s only a couple of players. No, no, the deadline has nothing to do with how we’ve been performing,” Claxton told The Post. “It’s just that we just need to find a way to just compete. Just compete; that’s all it is. I don’t think [so]. That’s an excuse. That’s a bad one.”
Claxton, backup center Day’Ron Sharpe, leading scorer Michael Porter Jr. and Cam Thomas are the only players whose names are regularly in trade rumors.
The Nets’ lapses and lack of concentration have been team-wide.
“At the end of the day, it’s our job. So regardless of whether we’re winning or not, we’ve got to come in here and give it our all,” Sharpe said. “We all come in here every day, it pays a lot of money, so we’ve got to do our job and perform every night regardless.”
The Nets are the youngest team in the NBA with five first-round rookies. They’ll have to take solace in knowing other tanking teams took similar beatings and emerged stronger, like OKC suffering a league-record 73-point loss in 2021-22.
Two years later, they won 57 games and three years later they won the title.
“I’ll just say, just remember this when it happens, when you’re a young guy and you get blown out,” said Sharpe. “We’ve seen it with teams like OKC. They used to lose a lot. Detroit two years ago, they were losing a lot. So just remember this pain that we’re taking from losing this way, and just build on it during the summer and build on it during your career so we don’t have the same mistakes as you get older.”
Brooklyn trailed LeBron James and the Lakers by 39 on Tuesday before trying to make it close late, losing 125-109. James, who was with Fernández when the latter was a player development coach in Cleveland, said the Spaniard is up to this task.
“He was just a sponge,” James said of Fernández’s time with Cleveland. “Obviously, when Mike Brown brought him in, he was just a sponge. You could tell that he had a hell of a work ethic. You could tell he knew the game and you knew at some point that he would be a [head] coach.
“[You] didn’t know if it would be collegiate, pro, whatever the case may be, but he would be a head coach somewhere. And he’s made it to being the head coach here and obviously it’s well deserved. So it’s pretty cool.”
