All of the Nets tanking and retooling was about Monday, about getting to the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery and, hopefully, winning it as they did a quarter century ago.
That started their turnaround from also-rans to conference champs. Can it happen again?
The Nets head to Chicago with the sixth-best odds to win the lottery — a 9 percent chance of winning the right to select Cooper Flagg.
Coach Jordi Fernández will be their representative on the dais — and hopefully bring them good fortune.
“We’re just ready to be lucky,” Fernández said recently.
Right before the Knicks will tip off their huge Game 4 playoff tilt against Boston in the Eastern Conference semifinals, the Nets will face a defining moment of their own, hoping to see deputy commissioner Mark Tatum reveal their logo for the first pick.
The Nets can end up almost anywhere from first to 10th, with seventh or eighth likelier than all other spots combined. Their odds of each spot are as follows:
- No. 1: 9 percent
- No. 2: 9.2 percent
- No. 3: 9.4 percent
- No. 4: 9.6 percent
- No. 5: zero percent
- No. 6: 8.6 percent
- No. 7: 29.7 percent
- No. 8: 20.6 percent
- No. 9: 3.7 percent
- No. 10: 0.6 percent
This will be the first lottery pick they’ve possessed since 2010. Where it lands Monday will go a long way toward determining their future.
Winning could be franchise-altering — as it was when they beat even worse odds back in 2000.
Playing in New Jersey then, the Nets went into the lottery with the seventh seed and just a 4.4 percent chance of winning. Tucked away in the NBA’s Secaucus, N.J., offices just four miles from the Meadowlands, they got lucky when one of their 44 number combinations — 6-8-9-14 — was drawn in the pingpong ball lottery.
“Being in the room as deputy commissioner Russ Granik started pulling them out … I shouted ‘bingo’ as they fell our way,” then-Nets co-chairman Finn Wentworth recalled to The Post.
But Wentworth, locked away in a secure location with the other team representatives, couldn’t share the news with the rest of the Nets brass. In another room on another floor, they didn’t find out until the envelopes were opened and principal owner Lewis Katz started joyously pumping his fist in the air.
“I was sequestered in the secure room upstairs in Secaucus NBA offices,” Wentworth said. “[I] had to wait approximately two hours after pulling ‘bingo,’ until halftime of [the] Knicks-Houston playoff game, for envelopes to be opened downstairs … and Russ Granik finally releasing me and other team reps to share the Nets joy downstairs.”
Unlike this loaded class — with Flagg backed up by the likes of Dylan Harper, Ace Bailey and VJ Edgecombe — that group 25 years ago was notably weak. Still, the Nets’ lottery luck let them not only draft their top prospect, but land somebody even more important.
“Fortunately, the best player was Kenyon Martin, and we got him,” Wentworth said. “Not only did we get Kenyon, but with the No. 1 draft [pick], I was able to attract Rod Thorn out of [the] NBA [league office] where he was ‘Dean of Discipline’ to become the president of Nets before the actual NBA draft.”
Thorn coming aboard was the jumping off point for consecutive NBA Finals berths.
“With Kenyon onboard, it was Rod who truly turned around the Nets with his trade to acquire Jason Kidd for Stephon Marbury the following year,” Wentworth told the Post. “Next stop, golden era of Nets basketball.”
These Nets are further along the path already.
Fernández earned high marks in his first season. And general manager Sean Marks has amassed the most draft capital in the league and finished eighth in NBA Executive of the Year balloting.
Monday will decide what kind of star they get to build around.
“The Nets beat the lottery odds before,” Wentworth said. “And it could happen again.”
If the 76ers finish outside the top six, their pick conveys to Oklahoma City, and the Nets get their first-rounder next year. But if Philadelphia lands inside the top six, the selection coming to Brooklyn will be pushed back to 2028.
