Canada's national team can breathe sigh of relief after Jordi Fernandez hiring by Nets

TORONTO — It’s a great problem to have.

One on hand, the Canadian men’s national team has hit it out of the park with its last two head coaching hires.

On the other, it has put Canada Basketball in a tricky situation in the build-up to crucial competitions windows in consecutive years, as Canada’s high-profile coaches end up being in-demand commodities in the NBA.

But it appears that the worst-case scenario — current head coach Jordi Fernandez being forced to bail out from his commitment to coach Canada at the 2024 Olympics in Paris — has been avoided.

The Brooklyn Nets made official Monday what was first reported last week: Fernandez, the highly respected Sacramento Kings assistant coach, would be the struggling NBA club’s next head coach, the fourth in the space of three years. He is expected to meet the media in Brooklyn on Wednesday.

For the national team and fans of the national team, Fernandez being hired by the Nets immediately brought to mind the scenario they faced in the summer 2023, when then national team head coach Nick Nurse resigned from the national team on June 27, five weeks before training camp opened for the FIBA Basketball World Cup.

Not all was lost. In the same motion that Nurse resigned, Fernandez was hired, the change in leadership announced concurrently with the news that Nurse’s commitments with the Philadelphia 76ers, who had hired the former Toronto Raptors head coach on June 1, would prevent him from coaching at the World Cup.

It was a blow at the time because even after Nurse had been fired by the Toronto Raptors this time a year ago, Canada Basketball felt confident that whatever job Nurse ended up taking, his commitment to the national team would be honoured.

It made for some tense moments last summer as Fernandez had not even a month to meet his new team and lead Canada through — arguably — the most crucial tournament in the history of the men’s program, but it couldn’t have worked out better for all concerned.

Fernandez adapted quickly and hit the ground running in the highest-profile head coaching opportunity of his career, as he led Canada to a 6-2 record and a history-making bronze medal and qualifying the men for their first Olympic appearance since 2000.

It was the definitive answer to the looming question of how — even with his considerable reputation as a head-coaching prospect on the rise after seven years as an NBA assistant — he would actually handle such a high-stakes situation.

Turns out he passed the test even before the tournament started.

“I think the moment all the players knew was during the pre-tournament games when we went into Spain and beat the [then] No. 1 team in the world on their home floor or go to Germany and beating [the eventual] world champions on their home floor, and doing it with tremendous calm in the foxhole, in the moment of greatest difficulty. Those things are not lost on players,” men’s national team general manager Rowan Barrett said in an interview on Monday. “What you’re designing, how you’re approaching it, all of those things. He was just as he presented all the way along [and], that’s been kind of who Jordi is. He’s honest, he tells you exactly what he thinks and what he believes in a consistent way, and he does it with great EQ [emotional intelligence], and I think it gives the group a lot of confidence.”

What gave Canada Basketball confidence was that as soon as Fernandez began getting feelers about the possibility of being hired by the Nets, he let everyone involved know that keeping his commitment to coach Canada in the Olympics was front-and-centre for him. The process with the Nets began just over a month ago, and Fernandez apprised Canada Basketball as it was happening, telling them that staying on to coach at the Olympics this summer was a top priority for him. In the meantime, Barrett was in regular communication with Nets general manager Sean Marks and Fernandez’s agent, outlining the plans Canada Basketball was putting together for the men’s team.

But until his hiring was official and the terms with the Nets understood, no one could be entirely sure how things would work out. Last summer, Nurse was expected to stay on with Canada Basketball when he was fired by the Raptors in April and hired by the Sixers on June 1, but in the end it didn’t happen, opening the door for Fernandez.

This time around, Canada Basketball was optimistic all along, and confident now, with the men’s team training camp scheduled to begin in late June.

“It’s always important to understand where the coach's mind is, and our coach has been locked in and ready to coach this team this summer all along,” said Barrett. “He was undaunted, he was clear about what he wanted and that he wanted to coach this team, and from there, it was just making sure we're kind of on the same page. ... He's gonna have a couple of months here to look at his situation in Brooklyn as well as ensuring that we're ready getting ready for the start of our camp.”

That the Nets zeroed in on Fernandez so early after the regular season concluded will doubtless be to the benefit of everyone. From the moment a head coach is hired, he’s in a track meet to build out his staff, establish plans for the summer, connect with returning players, learn the ins and outs of a new organization, not to mention move his family — in this case — across the United States. Doing it all for the first time is especially daunting.

The Raptors hired Darko Rajakovic in the middle of June, and the first-year head coach was in constant motion from that moment until the end of his first season.

“It was very hectic. I was on my cell phone eight, nine hours a day, not texting but actually talking,” Rajakovic said. “If you go back and look at some of my early interviews at summer league [in July], I lost my voice.

"I was trying to get the best coaching staff, the best people, the best experts on the team. That was No. 1.

“After that, go visit players, go talk to them, see their expectations, what they want, what they need,” Rajakovic continued. “Then, there was a decision after summer league, should I go home [to Serbia] or not? I decided that, yes, I should go home, spend time with my wife and son. But that turned out to be me showing at a coffee shop at 8 in the morning and leaving that same coffee shop at 5 p.m. and being on my computer planning for a coaching retreat and offensive and defensive playbooks and how we’re going to do scouting, and all of that. It’s like you’re putting the whole system in, so it was a lot of preparation and a lot of not-enough-time-in-the-day.”

Does that sound like there was time to fit in a six-week stint coaching the Canadian national team?

Of course not. Fernandez is going to be going full steam for the foreseeable future.

But it does help that on the national team side, Fernandez is a returning coach, and also that in Nate Bjorkgren and Nate Mitchell, the men’s team is returning a pair of experienced assistant coaches who have been part of the program going back to 2019.

As well, that the Nets getting their hiring done early and being willing to accommodate Fernandez along the way promises to be the crucial differentiator from what the program had to manage with Nurse’s last-minute resignation a year ago.

Still, the looming conflict is that Summer League — where a first-year head coach gets a dry run an implementing his plans — takes place July 12-22, which is when Canada is expecting to be in Europe for its final build-up before the Olympic tournament tips off July 27.

“I don't sense that we're going to have any challenges there, from our conversations,” said Barrett. “He should be there for our practices and our games. And so we should be good.”

And, hopefully, from there, great.

If it all works out, it should put Canada in a strong position going forward, wherever its coaching needs take it. Fernandez is under contract through the end of the Olympics but there is optimism that the relationship could be extended through the next Olympic cycle, which would wind up with the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

If for some reason that doesn’t happen, Canada would be in a strong position to recruit its next head coach, as leading one of the best national teams in the world is a pretty strong platform to audition for an NBA head coaching opportunity, with Fernandez’ path offering a convincing proof-of-concept.

That’s all for another day, but for now what seems to be happening is the best of both worlds — Canada’s preferred coach staying on to lead it through the Olympics, while simultaneously earning one of the most difficult positions to achieve in basketball: NBA head coach.

“We’re excited for him, it's a great opportunity,” said Barrett. “There's only so many teams in the NBA and there's coaches all across the world. It's a coveted role. So, I'm happy to see that — not that he was an unknown commodity in the NBA world —  but I'm happy to see that through all of his efforts through the years, as well as his performance last summer with our team that, you know, the NBA world is taking notice to the level of actually hiring him.”

And that Canada gets to keep him.