Nets coach Jordi Fernandez will still coach Canada at Paris Olympics

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Canadian basketball fans breathed a sigh of relief when Canada Basketball confirmed this week that Jordi Fernandez still is Paris-bound.

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Fernandez, a long-time NBA assistant coach who boosted his resume significantly by leading the Canadian senior men’s team to a bronze medal at last summer’s FIBA World Cup, was hired Monday as the head coach of the Brooklyn Nets.

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Canada also qualified for the Olympics for the first time since 2000 thanks to last year’s performance and there was some fear that Fernandez would not lead the team again if he got his first NBA head coaching job this off-season, since that’s what happened with Fernandez’s predecessor, Nick Nurse.

But Canada Basketball cleared things up this week.

“We have been working closely with both Jordi and the Nets throughout the process and we can confirm that Jordi will remain as our coach this summer at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, as we look forward to build on the success we had last summer at the FIBA Men’s Basketball World Cup,” Canadian general manager Rowan Barrett said in a statement.

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“Canada Basketball is excited that our senior men’s national team head coach Jordi Fernandez has been hired by the Brooklyn Nets as their next head coach,” Barrett also said. “This is a great opportunity that Jordi and his family have worked long and hard to achieve and he deserves the trust Brooklyn is showing in him.”

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Fernandez most recently served as associate coach of the Sacramento Kings, helping that franchise break a long playoff drought that stretched back to 2006.

Brooklyn is coming off a 32-50 season and still is trying to find an identity after the Big 3 experiment around Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving was a massive failure for various reasons.

There will be plenty of demands on Fernandez’s time this summer — Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic recently talked about how busy his first summer was upon being hired — but that the hiring happened so early in the off-season seems beneficial to all.

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Still, when the Sixers hired Nurse after he was fired by the Raptors basically at the same point in April in 2023, Canada Basketball initially said in a statement that Nurse would continue to coach the Canadian team.

But about two months later the news came that Nurse was out, with Fernandez being parachuted in.

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