The Nets’ 113-105 loss to the Knicks mercifully put an end to their regular season.
Next comes the bigger stakes: the NBA draft lottery.
In front of team owner Joe Tsai, the Nets finished with the league’s sixth-worst record (26-56) — and thus the sixth-best odds in the lottery that will be the foundation of their rebuild.
Yes, the Nets have hoarded the most cap space in the NBA, but they also have a league-high 31 future draft picks, and five of them will come in this year’s generational class. They’ll have four in just the first round on June 25 at Barclays Center, including their own natural pick.
That’s why, despite everything the Nets slogged through this season — leading the league in games lost to injury, cycling through a team-record 27 players under contract — it was really only Year Zero of this rebuild.
Next season will be Year One, with those yet-to-be-drafted rookies as the building blocks.
“As a fan base, you want to say, ‘I remember when they drafted this guy; I’ve seen the development course of such-and-such player,’” Nets general manager Sean Marks told YES Network before Sunday’s finale.
Marks is going to be the man responsible for picking those players, as well as the grand plan.
If the Nets don’t accelerate the rebuild by trading for a superstar, they could flip solid veterans such as Cam Johnson and Nic Claxton for lesser players that won’t hurt a 2025-26 tank but come attached with even more draft picks.
The Nets at least helped themselves somewhat in the draft Sunday.
The lottery won’t be until May 12, and they’ll have a nine percent shot at winning the right to select Duke forward Cooper Flagg and 37.2 percent odds at landing somewhere in the top four. Their natural pick has better than even odds at being seventh (29.8 percent) or eighth (20.6 percent).
They also hold the natural picks of the Bucks, Knicks and Rockets.
Their Milwaukee pick is in a three-way tie for 18th with Washington (from Memphis) and Miami (from Golden State). The Knicks selection is 26th, one spot ahead of the Houston pick.
All ties will be broken in the coming days by random drawings in Secaucus, N.J., overseen by Ernst & Young.
“For obvious reasons … developing doesn’t stop right now, we’re going into a very important summer for us,” coach Jordi Fernández said.
“After this game … we’ll probably evaluate, and we’ll sit, Sean, myself. We’ll have a plan. We’ve already started with our plan for what we’re trying to do this summer. But to me, the most important thing has been things come at you very fast in this job, and you don’t know until you know. Even though you have an idea of how you want to do things, then when you’re on that chair, things change and you have to pivot one way or the other.”
