Jordi Fernández will be the new coach of the Brooklyn Netsthe ESPN network said this Monday, so it will become the first coach born in Spain to lead a team from the NBA.
Adrian Wojnaroswki, one of the journalists with the best sources in the NBA, said on ESPN that the Catalan, who is now assistant coach at the Sacramento Kings as well as Canada coach, is the first option for the Nets bench. Shams Charania, the other great ‘insider’ in 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 Basketball World Cup in 2023, is one of the most valued assistant coaches at the moment in the NBA and his name had been heard as a possible head coach of a franchise in recent years. Without going any further, the Brooklyn is not the only team that had thought about him for next season since the Charlotte Hornets also placed him among their candidates to be their future coach earlier this month.
“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 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, Nic Claxton, Dennis Schroder and 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) and the Denver Nuggets (assistant from 2016 to 2022) before giving the jump to Sacramento as “associate head coach” under Mike Brown. “If my good work gives me that opportunity (to be a head coach), I will be prepared. I believe I am and will be able to do 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.
2024-04-16 04:32:03
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