Nets 2024-25 season preview, predictions: Starting five, games to watch and everything you need to know

The Post’s Brian Lewis makes answers the biggest Nets questions, makes bold predictions and picks the five biggest games of the 2024-25 season:This might be the most important question they have to answer between now and the season finale.Make no mistake, the Nets’ record will likely be poor.And a few seasons of constant losing can infect a franchise’s DNA.

Just ask the woebegone Pistons, who sank to historic levels of futility despite years and years of lottery picks stacked on top of one another.Yes, Fernandez is a development coach that will look to guide young(ish) talents like Thomas and still-improving center Nic Claxton.More on that part later.

But much of the good habits and positive culture developed under former coach Kenny Atikinson atrophied under successors Steve Nash and Jacque Vaughn, and the player-led team that should’ve developed under the Big Three of Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden never did.Can Fernandez (re)build that?“A lot of reps.A lot of physicality.

How you want to play.Changing the culture a bit,” Schroder said.That culture will be important, not just in properly molding youngsters like Thomas (and maybe Noah Clowney, Jalen Wilson and the future rookies drafted with a projected four first-round picks in June), but also appealing to free agents next summer when Brooklyn could have $60 million to spend.The question is just as important as it always has been.

Missing Simmons for a few games now — or even a few weeks — won’t have the same impact it did when they had Durant and Irving and legitimate championship aspirations back in 2021-22 and 2022-23.To say Simmons’ health has let him — and his teams — down is an understatement.He’s missed a staggering 189 of 246 games for Brooklyn and Philadelphia over the previous three seasons due to a bad back, herniated discs and nerve impingements forcing two microscopic partial discectomies.Few expect Simmons to ever approach his former form as a three-time Al...