The Brooklyn Nets will have their first preseason game on Saturday as they prepare for a 2025-26 NBA season that will hopefully give the franchise hope for the future. Brooklyn has been having a good camp so far based on what head coach Jordi Fernandez and the players have said to the media thus far, but there doesn’t seem to be much outside optimism on the Nets.

“The Brooklyn Nets will also rely heavily on a mostly unproven rotation. Theirs could include up to five first-round picks from this summer’s draft: Egor Demin, Nolan Traoré, Drake Powell, Ben Saraf and Danny Wolf,” Bleacher Report’s Andy Bailey wrote to begin the section on Brooklyn. The Nets rank 29th out of 30 teams for B/R’s first power rankings of the season and it appears that the infusion of youth could be the reason for the low ranking.

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“But new Net Michael Porter Jr. is still one of the best shooters in the NBA,” Bailey continued. “Nicolas Claxton had a down year offensively in 2024-25, but he hasn’t had a below-average box plus/minus since 2019-20. And Terance Mann has a long track record of being a solid multi-positional gap-filler. Brooklyn should get meaningful contributions from all three. That and playing in the East gives them the slight edge over Utah.”

To Bailey’s point, Brooklyn will most likely be relying on at least two of the rookies that the team selected in the first round of the 2025 NBA Draft earlier in the summer. As of now, it seems that Cam Thomas, Michael Porter Jr., and Nic Claxton are projected to be starters while players like Noah Clowney and Egor Demin could be the starting power forward and point guard, respectively, coming out of training camp.

There is a possibility that the Nets could have all five of the rookies in the rotation at some point during the season, but that most likely will come after the trade deadline, assuming that some of the veterans currently on the team are traded away. Either way, Brooklyn is expected to be one of the worst teams in the league by the time the season is over so Nets fans should expect plenty of growing pains along the way for this young roster.

This article originally appeared on Nets Wire: Nets rank as 29th-best team in NBA heading into 2025-26 season