Through their first five games the Nets are who most people thought they were: Young and bad.
With five first-round picks, the spotlight is perhaps brightest on Egor Dëmin, the eighth-overall selection, who has yet to take a shot inside the 3-point arc.
With the Nets having three days between home games, Dëmin said that was a focal point for him.
“Just trying to get to the paint as much as I can to get the angles,” Demin said following Friday’s practice in Brooklyn. “Not going around the player, but through.”
And once he gets there? “Looking to finish,” he said.
The same goes for his approach on pick-and-rolls, where he has to take the ball deeper into the paint in order to let the play develop.
“It’s important for our point guards to be aggressive, and from there, he’ll figure it out,’’ head coach Jordi Fernández said of Dëmin. “He’s a very good 3-point shooter [and] he’s a very good passer and [with] him being aggressive, the team is gonna benefit from it.”
It’s a team that hosts the 76ers at Barclays Center Sunday, still in search of their first win of the season. They entered Friday as one of only three teams without a victory, along with New Orleans and Indiana.
Dëmin is just part of the issues, as the 19-year-old has taken all 22 of his field-goal attempts from 3-point range, hitting a solid 40.9 percent of them, along with 10 assists and eight turnovers.
For the tanking Nets, who are also playing rookie point guard Ben Saraf a decent amount, it’s made it difficult to get a victory, as Michael Porter Jr. noted following their most recent loss to Atlanta.
“We have a lot of rookie point guards who are going to be great in this league for a long time, but they’re still rookies,’’ Porter said. “I think the point guard position may be the hardest position in the game, and we have a lot of young guys playing that position. So it’s really hard to win when that point guard spot isn’t solidified.”
Asked about Porter’s perspective, Fernández said he hadn’t heard it, but declined to place the blame on Dëmin and the other young players for their early-season woes.
“I don’t know what Mike said, but the reality is, these guys work every day, they have the right intentions and they’re the right people here for what we’re trying to do,’’ Fernández said. “Nobody’s perfect here. We’re gonna continue to get better. I think this group is growing. We’ve already grown in five games. We’re process-oriented; we’re not result-oriented and that’s the most important thing. It’s about growth, and a lot of times, growth comes with pain. And that’s for everybody, not for just one person. I think we all have high standards for ourselves and we all should look at ourselves in the mirror and think about, ‘What can I do better, how can I help the team and how can I help my teammates?’”
Dëmin said the biggest challenge he’s faced so far is “probably just the physicality” of the league.
“I got comfortable in the first couple games with my shooting and I was kind of settling back with that, which is something I’ve got to change,” said Dëmin, still managing the plantar fasciitis that bothered him during the preseason, but an injury that he said no longer impacts him when he’s on the court. “I’ve got to keep shooting, but I’ve got to get to the paint as much as I can because when we get to the paint, something good is gonna happen.”
