NEW YORK -- The Brooklyn Nets came into the 2025-26 NBA season with the goal of developing as many of the younger players on the team as possible, including the five rookies from the 2025 NBA Draft. Brooklyn also made some changes to the roster, such as trading for former Denver Nuggets forward Michael Porter Jr., as the franchise continued to look towards the future.
"I think it's going to take a little bit of time to decompress like all seasons, but, I think looking back on it, one thing we can certainly be proud of is the development," Nets general manager Sean Marks said during his exit interview. With the rookie class of Egor Demin, Nolan Traore, Drake Powell, Ben Saraf, and Danny Wolf, Marks and head coach Jordi Fernandez had to find some way to incorporate five rookies into the development plan at the same time.
"I think with the system that we had here, it worked very well between Long Island, the coaching staff and the front office. The exposure that these guys had to real games, I think we led the league in minutes played by rookies, and that tells you a lot," Fernandez said. "The best player development coach ever is real minutes. And just minutes, but competitive minutes and we've seen that."
Coming into the season, the Nets were projected to win somewhere around 20 games and given that they finished with a 20-62 record (third-worst in the NBA), it seems that the public was correct about Brooklyn's winning potential. Throughout most of the season, Brooklyn showed how hard it is to win games as one of the youngest teams in the league despite having productive veterans in forward Michael Porter Jr. and center Nic Claxton, for example.
As Fernandez noted, the Nets led the league in minutes played by rookies (6,716) and that includes the minutes played by undrafted rookie free-agents in guard Malachi Smith (359 minutes played) and Two-Way forward Chaney Johnson (348). Ultimately, once Brooklyn was eliminated from the postseason in mid-March, Fernandez decided to play some of the lesser-used players to continue to evaluation process of the entire roster.
There was a period of time where the Nets looked like they could surprise the league by making a run at the Eastern Conference play-in tournament as they had one of the better records (7-4) in the NBA during December. Brooklyn achieve that high by sporting the best defensive rating in the league during the month (105.4) while Porter had arguably his best month of the season by averaging 28.3 points, 7.7 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.2 steals per game while shooting 51.5% from the field and 47.5% from three-point land.
Brooklyn came back down to Earth in January as they finished the month with a 3-14 record and from there, they never won more than three games in a month for the rest of the season. While the Nets once again had one of the worst records in the league, the hope is that the 2026 NBA Draft will present them with their next franchise player. However, the season showed more for Brooklyn than just a mountain of losses.
This article originally appeared on Nets Wire: Reviewing the Nets' 2025-26 NBA season as the team rebuilds for future