The Nets Are 0-4, and Their Rebuild's Two Best Pieces Have Shared the Floor for Four Minutes

Four games into the 2026-27 season, the Brooklyn Nets are tied for the worst record in the Eastern Conference and one of the more awkward structural problems in the league. It is not simply that they are losing. It is how the losing is being distributed.

Brooklyn sits at 0-4 after a 125-124 overtime loss in Boston on Tuesday, a game in which Jayson Tatum scored 40 points and buried a 17-footer at the buzzer. The Nets had climbed back into it, forced overtime, and then watched the deciding possession end with rookie Mikel Brown Jr. forcing a contested layup attempt at the other end rather than absorbing a foul — leaving Boston 2.3 seconds and the ball. Tatum did the rest.

That single sequence is the story of the week, but it is also a useful lens on a bigger question: the Nets' foundational pairing of Egor Dëmin and Brown has played roughly four minutes together through four games. The two are the stated centerpieces of the rebuild. They are, so far, ships passing in the rotation.

Why the split exists

The explanation is mostly logistical, and mostly defensible in isolation. Brown, the No. 6 pick, missed most of the preseason with an ankle injury and is on a minutes restriction that head coach Jordi Fernández has said will not be lifted "anytime soon." He is averaging 22.7 minutes off the bench and shooting 28.6 percent from the floor — 10-of-35 across three games — while flashing real shot-creation equity (35 percent from three on 6.7 attempts per game, 10.3 points, 4.3 assists). He also sat out the Indiana game entirely for back-injury maintenance, which the team characterized as preventative.

Dëmin, for his part, has started all four games but has been wildly uneven: 22 points, six assists and 7-of-7 from the line in Cleveland, then a combined 9 points on 4-of-19 in the other three. Meanwhile the 2025 first-round trio of Drake Powell, Danny Wolf and Ben Saraf has been largely squeezed out of Fernández's rotation altogether.

So the Nets are running a "competitive" rotation with veterans — Julius Randle at 35.2 minutes a night (22.5 points, 5.8 assists) and Michael Porter Jr. at 32.0 (22.8 points, 7.0 rebounds, 40.5 percent from three) — while the players who matter most to 2028 get situational minutes. Porter was excellent in Boston: 27 points, 12 rebounds, 6-of-12 from deep. Randle took 23 shots. Those two are keeping Brooklyn in games. They are also absorbing the possessions the kids need.

The numbers behind the 0-4

The four losses aren't uniform. Brooklyn lost by 7 to Charlotte, by 4 in Cleveland, got run off the floor 136-109 at home by Indiana — a performance Fernández bluntly called "unacceptable" — and then played its best game of the year in a one-point overtime defeat.

Across the season, the profile is bad in a specific way: 114.2 points scored, 124.0 allowed, a minus-9.8 differential and a minus-9.3 net rating that ranks 22nd in the league. The offense is functional (109.0 offensive rating over the last five). The defense is not (118.5). Brooklyn has coughed up 71 turnovers in four games — nearly 18 a night — and the fouling and transition breakdowns compound it. In Boston, the effort masked the flaws. Against Indiana, it exposed every one.

The schedule offers a soft landing: Detroit at home on October 30, then Indiana, New York and Charlotte again. But the more important variable is internal. The Nets can keep leaning on Randle and Porter to stay within shouting distance, or they can start treating Brown's and Dëmin's shared minutes as a developmental priority rather than a luxury. An 0-4 start doesn't define a season. A rebuild that spends its first month with its two most important players on opposite ends of the substitution pattern might.