Sean Marks: Brooklyn Nets don’t want to ‘lock ourselves into being a 6-7 seed’

Alongside Head Coach Jordi Fernández, GM Sean Marks reflected on the 2024-25, and more crucially, revealed major hints about the team’s future plans.

General Manager Sean Marks actually said the damn thing.

Following a predictable, if slightly more competent than expected season for the Brooklyn Nets in 2024-25, Marks and Head Coach Jordi Fernández took the podium at HSS Training Facility for their joint exit interview on Monday afternoon.

A season in which Jalen Wilson and Keon Johnson were the team’s two leading minute-getters produced a 26-56 record, and the sixth-best odds heading into the NBA Draft Lottery. These 82 games, the very hiring of Fernández, and Marks’ decision to re-acquire Brooklyn’s own first-rounders in 2025 and 2026 last summer have signaled a full-scale rebuild.

But because the Nets got off to a fanbase-paralyzing 9-10 start, because they kept Cam Johnson through the trade deadline, and because reports of their interest in Giannis Antetokounmpo are still surfacing, Marks had to answer the following question.

What qualities are you looking for in a star trade?

If it seems a little early to be talking about star trades, it is. The Brooklyn Nets have yet to make a single draft pick since signaling rebuild last summer, and yet, Antetokounmpo’s name has been whispered about. Does the front office just love him, or do they just have little interest in losing plenty of games over the next couple seasons?

So, after the ninth-year GM noted Brooklyn’s next star must “fit our culture,” he took an opportunity to clarify Brooklyn’s long-term thinking:

“If you’re going after max-level talent, they have automatically and absolutely change the trajectory of your team. This can’t be like let’s go get this [guy] and lock ourselves into being a 6-7 seed. When we go all-in, you’re going in to compete at the highest level and contend.” [Emphasis mine]

This seems to answer the question Brian Lewis asked in his New York Post article that name-dropped Giannis at the beginning of the month: “Are potential lesser targets like Ja Morant, Domantas Sabonis, Trae Young or LaMelo Ball worth emptying the proverbial clip for if it means abandoning all hope for the Greek Freak?”

Marks’ quote is about as close to a definitive ‘no’ as you’re going to get, and it may reinforce the idea that the Nets are committed to a long-term rebuild. It may even suggest that, as much as Brooklyn is enamored with Antetokounmpo, now is not the time.

“I think we need to be opportunistic,” Marks said when discussing the upcoming free agent period. “In this market we’re always going to have various different free agents and opportunities thrown at us. Just simply being in a top five market in the league, that’s going to happen. We don’t want to get sped up. We’ve talked multiple times about being systematic and strategic in how we build here. We know we have 15 first round picks in the next six, seven years; so there’s a lot of draft assets at stake. There’s a lot of cap room at stake, and how we use that, it’s probably too early to determine.”

Indeed, Brooklyn is projected to have over $50 million in cap room this summer, in their own stratosphere of flexibility relative to the rest of the NBA…

Before the Nets peer out the window, though, they need to do some housekeeping themselves. Between their restricted and unrestricted free agents, they have seven players set to at least test the market, and that’s not even counting the club options they could decline.

Whether it’s re-signing players like Cam Thomas and Day’Ron Sharpe or nailing their 2025 NBA Draft, Sean Marks professed the importance of homegrown talent, specifically under the new CBA.

“I do think it is important to have guys under contract that you control the contracts, so to speak. You drafted them, you developed them, and they got to their second contract under your watch. It’s difficult when you’re trying to acquire max-level talent on max contracts. Those days are probably gone of going and getting 2-3 max free agents and so forth. Those are gonna be more difficult to do, but I think it’s important to have some value contracts on your roster.”

It certainly sounds like the Nets have interest in retaining much of the team that won just 26 games this season, and judging by the players’ comments on Monday, the feeling is mutual. Thomas, Sharpe, Ziaire Williams, and D’Angelo Russell were all full of praise for the organization, and we’ll have more on the players’ comments in a separate story.

Their reasons, though, were clear. Head Coach Jordi Fernández once again got rave reviews, not just from his players, but his boss as well.

When asked why free agents around the league may want to play in Brooklyn, Marks said: “I think the sales pitch starts with the guy to my right. I think we’ve, we’ve talked about many players and what they’ve said about Jordi and his staff, I think that’s a huge sales pitch. They want to have coaches be up-front, honest with them, and they feel that, to be quite frank, he’s in it with us.”

While the May 12 draft lottery and subsequent decision-making from Brooklyn will steer the course of this rebuilding ship, one thing seems clear: They hired the right guy last summer.

As for Fernández, he didn’t speak copiously at the exit interview. Most questions were directed to Sean Marks, who in turn, was as direct as he’s ever been when discussing long-term plans. That’s what we’re here for, right?

But Fernández couldn’t depart for the summer without one last endorsement of — here’s that word again — the culture.

“I think it’s the quality of people that we have, and that’s how you drive the culture every day, and people that are pushing in the same direction. And the one thing that is important is communication. Communicate on how you want to do things, so there’s no different messages. A lot of times, there’s where there can be a little bit of confusion, and at the end of the day, you see this slippage. And I think, like the quality of this group, the human quality has been great.”

As the Philadelphia 76ers lead-frogged Brooklyn in the race to the bottom, and as the Utah Jazz were hopelessly miserable this season, many mock-GMs harangued fellow fans about the finer points of tanking, of how to maximize pick value. And they weren’t wrong to do so; the true rebuild starts this offseason.

However, it appears the Brooklyn Nets had no such organizational dissent. Marks and Fernández, unsurprisingly, presented a unified front on Monday. The season went well, they said, with plenty of player-development wins like Tyrese Martin’s assist:turnover ratio and Ziaire Williams’ 3-point shooting.

Now, according to each, it’s a do-or-die summer, just as every day is do-or-die when building a culture.

That build may take a while. Sean Marks does not seem gung-ho on accelerating the timeline, big-game hunting just to end up in the Play-In Tournament. That was the biggest takeaway from Monday’s exit interviews.