Nets rebuild now enters into hands of NBA Draft Lottery

Brooklyn’s season mercifully ends on Sunday.Then they’ll start what Nets head coach Jordi Fernandez repeatedly calls the biggest summer of their lives.Hyperbole aside, it’s easy to see why.The Nets’ future will largely be decided in exactly a month at the NBA Draft Lottery on May 12.

It hasn’t even happened yet, but it’ll be one of the more pivotal points in their recent history.It’s why this season was this trying and tiring.Regardless of what happens in Sunday’s season finale against the Knicks, Brooklyn is guaranteed to finish with the league’s sixth-worst record — and this the lottery’s sixth-best odds.The Nets have a 9.0 percent chance of winning and 37.2 percent odds of securing a coveted top 4 pick.

But by far the likeliest outcome is far worse, landing seventh (29.8 percent) or eighth (20.6).Brooklyn GM Sean Marks has assiduously collected not only the most cap space in the league (well over $50 million this summer) but also the most future draft picks (31).The Nets have five picks in June, four of them first-rounders.Coming into the weekend, they were slated to draft sixth, tied for 18th, tied for 25th, 27th and 36th.“We’re not going to know where the lottery is going to fall because that’s part of the odds and so forth,” Fernandez said recently.

“So, you can only control what you can control, and right now that’s what we know for sure.“This is not the end of anything.… This is just the next game, the next game going into the most important summer of our lives.”After Sunday’s finale at the Barclays Center, the rival Knicks will head off to the postseason while the Nets go to the offseason.

That’s where Marks will have important calls to make.Some will be impacted by things out of their control.Potential ties — and there will likely be some, with nine teams crammed within four games of each other in the standings — will be broken days after the regular season ends.

Then comes the all important lottery, whe...