Basketball coach Jordi Fernández Torres has become the first Spanish head coach to lead an NBA franchise, the Brooklyn Nets.
Born in Badalona (Barcelona, ??Spain) on December 27, 1982, at the age of 41 he will fulfill one of his greatest dreams, being the head coach of an NBA team. In the summer of 2006, like many coaches on the European continent, he decided to embark on his adventure in the United States in the form of a summer campus with the aim of learning from the best and one day becoming the head of a bench.
Graduated in Physical Activity and Sports Sciences from the University of Lleida, he was a student at the HvO University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. And he was also a professor at the University of Volda in Norway.
Before becoming a coach he played basketball, but from the age of 15 he was attracted to the benches. The first in training categories in Badalona, ??L’Hospitalet and Lleida.
In the L’Hospitalet team, in the LEB Plata, he was a physical trainer and also directed his youth team.
After many years in Spanish youth basketball, his first contact with the American team was during the summers of 2004 and 2005 on the Oklahoma campus, an experience that was followed in 2006 by a job as a coach for the company Impact Basketball in Las Vegas. . He was there until 2009.
In that city he met coach Mike Brown, who took him in the 2009-10 season to work with him at the Cleveland Cavaliers in Ohio, where he remained for four seasons until 2012-13, the last three with Byron Scottt as head coach.
In these years he carried out player development tasks, such as preparing individual training sessions, matches and international scouting for the NBA team. He worked among others with players like Lebron James and Shaquille O’Neal.
In the 2013-14 campaign he was an assistant coach at the Canton Charge, the Cavaliers’ team in the Developmental League (NBDL), and in September 2014 he was named their head coach, becoming the first Spaniard to lead a team in the league. American professional.
From this position he prepared future players for the Cavaliers, then led by Israeli David Blatt (2014-16).
In July 2016, he left the Canton Charge bench to join the Denver Nuggets as an assistant coach under Mike Malone and who had just joined the Spaniard Juancho Hernangómez.
In May 2022 he became an assistant for the Sacramento Kings, who days before had hired Brown as head coach.
On December 14 of that year he made his debut as the team’s head coach in the game against the Toronto Raptors, after Brown was ejected in the third quarter. In addition to being the first Spanish coach to “direct” an NBA match, he did so with victory (123-124), with an outstanding performance by Domantas Sabonis.
In addition to his work in the NBA, Fernández was part of the technical team of the Spanish Under’19 team that in 2013 was fifth in the Prague World Cup and of the Spanish senior national team led by Juan Antonio Orenga that was fourth finalist in the World Cup in Spain in 2014. Then, in the summer of 2017 he was one of the coaches of Scariolo’s team for the Eurobasket.
His first experience as a head coach on the North American continent was in Canada, when he was hired to be the coach before the 2023 Basketball World Cup that was held in different countries in Asia. There he achieved a historic milestone, the bronze medal in that tournament, the first in history for a country like Canada.