{"id":24824,"date":"2025-11-01T04:08:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T04:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/24824\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T04:08:23","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T04:08:23","slug":"nets-egor-demin-is-keeping-his-focus-on-making-strides-in-key-area","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/24824\/","title":{"rendered":"Nets’ Egor Demin is keeping his focus on making strides in key area"},"content":{"rendered":"

Through their first five games the Nets are who most people thought they were: Young and bad.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With five first-round picks, the spotlight is perhaps brightest on Egor D\u00ebmin<\/a>, the eighth-overall selection, who has yet to take a shot inside the 3-point arc.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With the Nets having three days between home games, D\u00ebmin said that was a focal point for him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cJust trying to get to the paint as much as I can to get the angles,\u201d Demin said following Friday\u2019s practice in Brooklyn. \u201cNot going around the player, but through.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

And once he gets there? \u201cLooking to finish,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"BrooklynBrooklyn Nets guard Egor Demin (8) drives around Cleveland Cavaliers guard Craig Porter Jr. (9) in the second half at Barclays Center, Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, in Brooklyn, NY. Corey Sipkin for the NY POST<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important for our point guards to be aggressive, and from there, he\u2019ll figure it out,\u2019\u2019 head coach Jordi Fern\u00e1ndez said of D\u00ebmin. \u201cHe\u2019s a very good 3-point shooter [and] he\u2019s a very good passer and [with] him being aggressive, the team is gonna benefit from it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

D\u00ebmin 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the tanking Nets, who are also playing rookie point guard Ben Saraf a decent amount, it\u2019s made it difficult to get a victory, as Michael Porter Jr. noted following their most recent loss to Atlanta.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"BrooklynBrooklyn Nets guard Cam Thomas (24) and guard Egor Demin (8) react in the second half against the Cleveland Cavaliers at Barclays Center, Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, in Brooklyn, NY. Corey Sipkin for the NY POST<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a lot of rookie point guards who are going to be great in this league for a long time, but they\u2019re still rookies,\u2019\u2019 Porter said. \u201cI 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\u2019s really hard to win when that point guard spot isn\u2019t solidified.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFollow all the basketball buzz in Brooklyn\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSign up for Inside the Nets by Brian Lewis, exclusively on Sports+.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tThank you\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Asked about Porter\u2019s perspective, Fern\u00e1ndez said he hadn\u2019t heard it, but declined to place the blame on D\u00ebmin and the other young players for their early-season woes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what Mike said, but the reality is, these guys work every day, they have the right intentions and they\u2019re the right people here for what we\u2019re trying to do,\u2019\u2019 Fern\u00e1ndez said. \u201cNobody\u2019s perfect here. We\u2019re gonna continue to get better. I think this group is growing. We\u2019ve already grown in five games. We\u2019re process-oriented; we\u2019re not result-oriented and that\u2019s the most important thing. It\u2019s about growth, and a lot of times, growth comes with pain. And that\u2019s 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, \u2018What can I do better, how can I help the team and how can I help my teammates?\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

D\u00ebmin said the biggest challenge he\u2019s faced so far is \u201cprobably just the physicality\u201d of the league.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI got comfortable in the first couple games with my shooting and I was kind of settling back with that, which is something I\u2019ve got to change,\u201d said D\u00ebmin, still managing the plantar fasciitis that bothered him during the preseason, but an injury that he said no longer impacts him when he\u2019s on the court. \u201cI\u2019ve got to keep shooting, but I\u2019ve got to get to the paint as much as I can because when we get to the paint, something good is gonna happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Through their first five games the Nets are who most people thought they were: Young and bad.\u00a0 With…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,355,99,5235,21,9,24,63,319],"class_list":{"0":"post-24824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brooklyn","8":"tag-brooklyn","9":"tag-brooklyn-headlines","10":"tag-brooklyn-nets","11":"tag-brooklyn-news","12":"tag-egor-demin","13":"tag-nba","14":"tag-new-york","15":"tag-new-york-city","16":"tag-nyc","17":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}