Nets’ Egor Demin remains focused on making progress in key areas

Through their first five games, the Nets are who most people thought they were: young and bad.

With five picks in the first round, the spotlight is perhaps brightest on Egor Dëmin, the eighth overall selection, who has yet to take a single shot inside the three-point arc.

With the Nets having three days between home games, Dëmin said this was an important point for him.

“I’m just trying to get to the paint as best I can to get the angles,” Demin said after Friday’s practice in Brooklyn. “Not around the player, but through it.”

And once he’s here? “I want to finish it,” he said.

The same goes for his approach to pick-and-rolls, where he needs to move the ball deeper into the paint for the play to develop.

“It’s important that our point guards are aggressive, and he’ll figure it out from there,” head coach Jordi Fernández said of Dëmin. “He’s a very good three-point shooter. [and] he is a very good passer and [with] Because he is aggressive, the team will benefit.”

It’s a team that hosts the 76ers at Barclays Center on Sunday, still looking for their first win of the season. They entered Friday as one of only three teams without a win, along with New Orleans and Indiana.

Dëmin is just part of the problem, as the 19-year-old has made all 22 field goal attempts from three-point range, hitting an impressive 40.9 percent of them, along with 10 assists and eight turnovers.

For the tanking Nets, who also play rookie point guard Ben Saraf quite a bit, it has become difficult to pull off a win like Michael Porter Jr. noted after their most recent loss to Atlanta.

“We have a lot of rookie point guards that are going to be great in this league for a long time, but they’re still rookies. I think the point guard position might be the toughest position in the game, and we have a lot of young guys playing that position.” So it’s very difficult to win if that point guard spot isn’t solidified.”

Asked about Porter’s perspective, Fernández said he had not heard it but refused to blame Dëmin and the other young players for their early-season woes.

“I don’t know what Mike said, but the reality is these guys work every day, they have the right intentions and they’re the right people here for what we’re trying to do,” Fernández said. “No one is perfect here. We’re going to keep getting better. I think this group is growing. We’ve already grown in five games. We’re process-oriented; we’re not results-oriented and that’s the most important thing. It’s about growth, and often growth comes with pain. And that applies to everyone, not just one person. I think we all have high standards for ourselves and we all have to look at ourselves in the mirror and think, ‘What can I do better, how can I help the team and how can I help my teammates?’

Dëmin said the biggest challenge he has faced so far is “probably just the physicality” of the competition.

“I felt comfortable with my shooting in the first few games and I was a little happy with that, something that I need to change,” said Dëmin, who was still dealing with the plantar fasciitis that bothered him in preseason but an injury that he said no longer bothers him when he is on the field. “I have to keep shooting, but I have to get to the paint as much as possible because when we get to the paint, something good is going to happen.”