Déjà vu hit the Nets like a truck on Saturday.
To end their five-game road trip, the Nets looked lifeless after a 53-point loss to the NBA title-contending Pistons, 130-77.
It marked Detroit’s largest margin of victory in franchise history.
It wasn’t just a typical outburst.
The Nets seemed to quietly retire.
These kinds of losses are starting to take their toll.
“Man, we’ve just got to learn from it. We can’t keep getting beat by 50 though,” Nic Claxton said after the loss. “It’s really demoralizing for us as a group. We have to come together and figure out ways to at least keep the games closer.”
The Nets are in the midst of another rebuilding season with a young roster after using a record five first-round picks in the 2025 draft.
The front office has made its tank mission known from the start.
“We spent everything [2025] picks – last summer we had five draft picks in the first round. We have one pick for 2026 and we hope to get a good pick,” team owner Joe Tsai said in October. “So you can predict what kind of strategy we will use this season.”
Losing wasn’t necessarily the problem during the 13-35 season.
They currently sit in fourth place in the race for the bottom, hoping to have favorable odds to land the No. 1 pick.
What the Nets have done over the past two weeks, however, is another level of losing.
Prior to their humiliation in Detroit, the Nets were embarrassed by the Knicks on January 21 at Madison Square Garden, losing by 54 points, 120–66.
It was the largest margin of victory in Knicks history, while the Nets had the lowest scoring performance in the entire NBA this season.
Four days later, the Clippers defeated Brooklyn by 37 points.
There is losing and then there is this: total shame.
“It’s not just that you don’t play hard consistently, it’s that you quit and we can’t allow that,” coach Jordi Fernández said. “It starts with me, I have to create habits, we did that. We did a good job. Even in this game, you can say the way we started playing basketball, we tried to match their physicality and play the right way and find ways to score. From then on it was a complete fall. So this one obviously hurts. I have to help them get better.”
After a 5-0 run in the final seconds against the Knicks bench, the Nets were spared the worst loss in franchise history: a 59-point drubbing against the Clippers last season on Jan. 15.
Entering the season, the second-worst Nets blowout loss was by 52 points at Houston on October 18, 1978.
However, the losses to the Knicks and Pistons have crossed the line and rank as the top three Nets worst losses in franchise history.
“We found ways to get good shots early, but it didn’t work out, we couldn’t match that, and then it was frustration, whatever you want to call it,” Fernández added. “He’s forgetting what to do. So we’ll reverse it. We’ll wait.” [our team] responsible, we will give them a hug, whatever the case may be. [We have to] go out there and play better than this.
For a team that was 7-4 in December and had the league’s highest defensive rating during that span (105.4), this probably isn’t the kind of tanking job Nets leadership had in mind.
It is up to Fernández to guide his young team after an embarrassing two weeks.
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