Jordi Fernández is nominated as the future coach of the Brooklyn Nets, the ESPN network said this Monday, making him the first coach born in Spain to lead an NBA team. Adrian Wojnaroswki, one of the journalists with the best sources in the NBA, said on ESPN that the Catalan, who is now an assistant coach at the Sacramento Kings as well as Canada's coach, is the first option for the Nets bench.
Shams Charania, the other great insider of the league, detailed last Saturday in The Athletic that he was one of the three candidates along with Mike Budenholzer (NBA champion in 2021 with the Milwaukee Bucks) and Kevin Young (assistant coach of the Phoenix Suns). According to Wojnaroswki, Fernández "has emerged as the Nets' option to become the next coach" distancing himself from his competitors and "will get the position of head coach of the Nets"
Fernández, who led Canada to bronze in the 2023 Basketball World Cup, is one of the most valued assistant coaches currently in the NBA and his name had been heard as a possible head coach of a franchise in recent years.
Without going any further, Brooklyn is not the only team that had thought about him for next season since the Charlotte Hornets also placed him among their candidates at the beginning of this month to be their future coach.
"This is going to come in the end: being in a hurry never helps and I have no anxiety about being head coach. It's going step by step and it will come. And when it will be," the Badalona native told EFE in an interview last February. . "Everything adds up. Those of us who have not been first coaches in the NBA, in the end it is also important that they see you in that role, wherever it may be. I have had the privilege of doing it in the G League, now in a World Cup and soon in the Olympic Games," he said.
41 years old, Fernández will finish the season with the Kings before taking the reins of Brooklyn. Sacramento (ninth in the West) plays this Tuesday against the Golden State Warriors (tenth) in the 'play-in'. The winner will face the loser of the duel between the New Orleans Pelicans (seventh) and the Los Angeles Lakers (eighth) for the last playoff ticket.
The Nets, after the dissolution of the 'superteam' led by Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving, have had a poor season that has not even allowed them to play in the play-in in the East. The New Yorkers have finished the regular phase with a sad balance of 32-50 that left them eleventh in the East.
The Nets began the season with Jacque Vaughn on the bench, who was fired in February. Kevin Ollie was the interim manager since then. Mikal Bridges is the figure of this group in which other names also stand out such as the controversial Ben Simmons, Cam Johnson, Cam Thomas, Nic Claxton, Dennis Schroder or Dorian Finney-Smith.
Kenny Atkinson, who has dual American and Spanish nationality, also trained in Brooklyn from 2016 to 2020. Fernández, in any case, will be the first head coach in the NBA born in Spain.
Fernández came to the US for the first time in 2004 to attend a summer camp and subsequently worked on the coaching staffs of the Cleveland Cavaliers (player development coach from 2009 to 2013), Canton Charge (player development coach from 2014 to 2016 this G League team affiliated with the Cavaliers and now called the Cleveland Charge) and the Denver Nuggets (assistant from 2016 to 2022) before making the jump to Sacramento as an associate head coach under Mike Brown. "If my good work gives me that opportunity (to be head coach), I will be prepared. I believe I am and will be capable of doing it," he told EFE in 2022.
The key to him settling in the United States was when he met Brown, who offered him a position with the Cavaliers "starting from the bottom." "What the American dream is. I left everything in Spain, in September I moved and I was learning and working a lot," said this coach in that interview who, throughout his already long career in the NBA, has worked on the court and the locker rooms with stars like LeBron James or Nikola Jokic.
Josh Lewenberg, journalist for the Canadian media TSN, shared this Monday on the social network "He has been in basketball for a long time. He has that European style for basketball, something huge because that is the way he is going in this sport. He is a great leader, a great communicator and he is very intelligent," he defended.
