Have Brooklyn Nets 'Learned Their Lesson' From Last Season?

The Brooklyn Nets are set for a tanking season, and there’s no doubt about their plan for 2026.

Going into the 2024-25 season, it was assumed that Brooklyn would be one of the worst teams in the Eastern Conference. Winning only 26 games last season, the Nets proved that assumption correct, but the season still featured a bit more winning than most anticipated.

Thanks to an early-season run led by Dennis Schroder and company, the Nets were ahead of most of the teams in the tank race throughout the season. Effectively having won too much to catch up, Brooklyn wasn’t near the top of the odds when the draft lottery came around in May.

While it turns out that wouldn’t have mattered much, given how wild the lottery results were, Brooklyn knew it needed to enter this season with a better tanking strategy. In a recent Bleacher Report article detailing the reason each team won’t win a title this season, Dan Favale echoed that same sentiment, noting that Brooklyn’s reason is that the team learned its lesson last season.

“Brooklyn's most veteran-possible lineup will feature Terence Mann, Nicolas Claxton, the fresh-off-a-restricted-free-agency-standoff Cam Thomas and…Ziaire Williams? MPJ is in there as well, at least until he starts load-managing between podcasts,” Favale wrote. “Head coach Jordi Fernandez is finally chaperoning a roster with which he can't overachieve. And if for some reason he does, general manager Sean Marks seems committed enough to the tank that he won't hesitate to replace him on the sidelines with Drew Timme.”

While Jordi Fernandez won’t have to worry about job security at any point in the season, even if he overachieves, there is something to the idea that the roster is already bad enough that he can’t repeat last season’s win toal. With so many rookies incoming and the vets being questionable contributors as Favale noted, the Nets simply don’t have a formula to win.

As for learning their lesson, the Nets simply have to play the numbers game, given that their 2027 pick is currently in the hands of the Houston Rockets. While some sort of play-in push or a stretch good enough to take them out of the race for the top odds wouldn’t necessarily be a disaster, raising the floor of where this 2026 pick could land in the lottery should be the main goal.

Brooklyn doesn’t have its franchise player yet, and it knows it can’t waste another season of rebuilding.