NEW YORK — Brooklyn Nets head coach Jordi Fernandez has always maintained a delicate balance between praising his players and criticizing them when they are performing below his expectations. Brooklyn began the 2025-26 NBA season with a disappointing effort, especially on the defensive end, and even after the team’s massive improvement on that end of the floor, Fernandez has to remind his players of what needs to be done.
“I would probably say the whole game. Even though we were right there [because] we started well, we just didn’t have the same engagement,” Fernandez said after Monday’s 120-107 loss to the Golden State Warriors. Coming into Monday’s matchup against Stephen Curry and company, the Nets had held their opponents to an average of 103.1 points per game, but they allowed the Warriors to score 120 points on 53.0% shooting from the floor.
“This is disappointing because there’s things you can control, and it’s your energy, whether you’re positive energy or negative energy, how you talk to your teammates,” Fernandez continued. “I thought that [because of that] frustration at times, or whatever the case may be, we dropped our shoulders too much, and we just got to be better. It reflected in our defense, with our attention to detail, our stance, our activity.”
While the Warriors rank in the middle of the pack of the league in offensive rating, they still have Curry, who dropped 27 points and five assists, and forward Jimmy Butler, who had 21 points, leading the way. Outside of those two stars, Golden State had four other players score in double figures, including guard Gary Payton II and his 10 points on 4-of-5 shooting from the field in just 10 minutes off the bench.
Ultimately, Brooklyn will likely finish December as the best defensive team in the NBA in terms of defensive rating, showing that it was still a great month for them in their development. However, it’s clear that Fernandez is trying to remind his players that the way this team wins games in using their defense to fuel their offense and performances like what they put on the floor Monday against the Warriors just won’t cut it.