Nets’ rebuild now enters into hands of NBA Draft Lottery

Brooklyn’s season mercifully ends on Sunday.

Then they’ll start what Nets head coach Jordi Fernandez repeatedly calls the biggest summer of their lives.

Hyperbole aside, it’s easy to see why.

The Nets’ future will largely be decided in exactly a month at the NBA Draft Lottery on May 12.

It hasn’t even happened yet, but it’ll be one of the more pivotal points in their recent history.

It’s why this season was this trying and tiring.

Regardless of what happens in Sunday’s season finale against the Knicks, Brooklyn is guaranteed to finish with the league’s sixth-worst record — and this the lottery’s sixth-best odds.

The Nets have a 9.0 percent chance of winning and 37.2 percent odds of securing a coveted top 4 pick.

But by far the likeliest outcome is far worse, landing seventh (29.8 percent) or eighth (20.6).

Brooklyn GM Sean Marks has assiduously collected not only the most cap space in the league (well over $50 million this summer) but also the most future draft picks (31).

The Nets have five picks in June, four of them first-rounders.

Coming into the weekend, they were slated to draft sixth, tied for 18th, tied for 25th, 27th and 36th.

“We’re not going to know where the lottery is going to fall because that’s part of the odds and so forth,” Fernandez said recently. “So, you can only control what you can control, and right now that’s what we know for sure.

“This is not the end of anything. … This is just the next game, the next game going into the most important summer of our lives.”

After Sunday’s finale at the Barclays Center, the rival Knicks will head off to the postseason while the Nets go to the offseason.

That’s where Marks will have important calls to make.

Some will be impacted by things out of their control.

Potential ties — and there will likely be some, with nine teams crammed within four games of each other in the standings — will be broken days after the regular season ends.

Then comes the all important lottery, where the Nets could land Cooper Flagg or tumble as low as tenth.

That, in turn, could influence what comes next.

Sources have repeatedly told The Post that part of the idea in collecting a league-best 13 tradeable first-round picks was not to actually make all of them but to use at least several in trade for an established star.

Two separate sources have suggested that Giannis Antetokounmpo is at the top of the wish list, should he ever become available.

But if he doesn’t?

The Nets not only have to make decisions on their own free agents — restricted free agents like Cam Thomas, Day’Ron Sharpe and Ziaire Williams, as well as unrestricted ones like Trendon Watford — but on the market as well.

That means deciding on a direction.

Do they tank? Or do they try?

They’re in the unique position of being the only team other than Detroit (and possibly Utah) with ample cap room.

They could hand offer sheets to youngish restricted free agents that fit their timeline, like Josh Giddey, Quentin Grimes, Santi Aldama and Jonathan Kuminga, or unrestricted free agents such as Ty Jerome (and Naz Reid, should he opt out).

But that comes with a catch.

Or more like a Catch 22.

Diving heavy into the market for impactful players — even if they squeeze them into positive contracts that will be tradable assets in a year — will undermine their potential to tank again next season, in a loaded 2026 draft class that is supposed to be every bit as deep as this one.

They clearly got next year’s pick for a reason.

Marks had shorted the Suns in the Kevin Durant trade, and it looks wise.

Parting with those Phoenix picks last summer was a dear price to pay to get their own 2025 and 2026 first-rounders back from Houston.

Landing an MVP like Antetokounmpo is obviously a home run, but would adding lesser players be worth turning that Rockets trade into a sunk cost?

The other option of course is for Marks to follow the blueprint of his first successful Brooklyn rebuild.

He could ink less impactful players to one-year deals — or two-year pacts with a team option — to punting that cap space into 2026 for a loaded free agent class, while aiming for another high lottery pick.

After trading Dorian Finney-Smith and Dennis Schroder early this season, he could flip Cam Johnson and Nic Claxton for lesser players with hefty expiring deals that come with first-rounders attached.

In short, getting paid picks to lose.

Or having his cake and eating it too.