Déjà vu hit the Nets like a truck Saturday.
To end their five-game road trip, the Nets looked lifeless in 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 blowout.
The Nets appeared to silently quit.
This brand of losing is starting to take a toll.
“Man, we just got to learn from it. We just can’t keep getting beat by 50 though,” Nic Claxton said after the loss. “It’s really demoralizing as a group for us. We got to come together and figure out ways to, at least, keep the games closer.”
The Nets are in another rebuilding season with a young squad after using a league record five first-round picks in the 2025 draft.
The front office has made its tanking mission known from the beginning.
“We spent all of our [2025] picks — we had five first-round draft picks this past summer. We have one pick in 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 for this season.”
Losing has not necessarily been the problem during their 13-35 season.
They currently find themselves fourth in the race for the bottom, with the hope of having favorable odds to land the No. 1 pick.
However, what the Nets have done the last two weeks is a different level of losing.
Prior to their humiliation in Detroit, the Nets were embarrassed by the Knicks at Madison Square Garden on Jan. 21, losing by 54 points, 120-66.
It was the biggest margin of victory in Knicks history while the Nets earned the lowest-scoring effort in the entire NBA this season.
Four days later, the Clippers beat Brooklyn by 37 points.
There’s losing and then there’s this — utter embarrassment.
“It’s not just that you don’t play consistently hard, it’s then you quit and we cannot allow that,” coach Jordi Fernández said. “It starts with me, gotta create habits, we’ve done it. We’ve done it well. Even in this game you can say the way we started playing basketball, we were trying to match their physicality and play the right way and find ways to score. From there, it was a complete fall down. So, obviously this one hurts. Gotta help them be better.”
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After a 5-0 run in the final seconds against the Knicks bench, the Nets were spared from the worst defeat in franchise history — a 59-point thrashing at the hands of the Clippers last season on Jan. 15.
Going into the season, the second-worst Nets blowout loss was by 52 points in Houston on Oct. 18, 1978.
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The losses to the Knicks and Pistons, however, have surpassed the mark to make up the top three of the Nets worst losses in franchise history.
“We found ways to get good shots early on and then we couldn’t. We couldn’t match that, and then it was from frustration to whatever you want to call it,” Fernández added. “It’s forgetting what you’re supposed to do. So, we’ll run it back. We’ll hold [our team] accountable, we’ll 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 with the top defensive rating across the league (105.4) during that span, this is likely not the kind of tank job the Nets leadership had in mind.
It will be on Fernández to guide his young team after a shameful two weeks.
