Cam Johnson helps Nets hold off late charge from Bucks for shock win

MILWAUKEE — Jordi Fernandez is coaching to win.

Not tomorrow or next season or the year after that, when the so-called tanking is done.

Right now.

And that’s how his Nets played in a gutty 113-110 victory over Milwaukee before a sellout crowd of 17,341 at Fiserv Forum.

The Nets had opened this trip by blowing a 21-point lead and losing to Orlando by a point.

But they closed it Thursday by jumping ahead by 24, and making just enough plays to hold on for dear life.

“Yeah, just learning from our mistakes. Just learning how to finish games. It just comes with time,” said Cam Thomas, who had 24 points and seven boards off the bench in his second game back from injury.

“It was better earlier in the year because we had training camp playing through everything. But now we’ve got two different players, different guys, different lineups, guys in and out of the lineup. So we’ve still got to find how we can play together in the last few minutes. But I think it’s going to come along good. We’ve just got to keep repping it.”

It came along good Thursday, thanks to Thomas and to Cam Johnson’s team-high 26 points on 6-of-12 from deep.

Johnson suffered an ankle injury on the final play of the game when he was battling for a rebound with teammate Ziaire Williams but X-Rays after the game were negative.

D’Angelo Russell (11 points and 12 ᴀssists) and Nic Claxton (16 points and 11 rebounds) each had double-doubles.

“Yeah, the league’s hard to win. Especially a young team winning is not easy,” said Russell, in just his second game of his Nets encore stint. “So for our group, I think the more we can find ways to not beat ourselves at the end of the game, I think we’ll be alright.

“Obviously, being a young team, you’ve got to beat yourself. You’re going to mess up. It’s part of being young in the league. So just limit those mistakes, we’ll be alright. We were beating ourselves at the end, and we still found a way to win. So if we limit those plays we’ll be alright.”

The Nets have shown more pluck and won more games than many expected during a season they’re perceived as tanking.

“Jordi and I had heart-to-hearts of hey, look we’re going to build this and this is how we’re going to build it. We want to be a partnership together on this. So he’s been nothing but fantastic,” GM Sean Marks told the Post. “He made it very clear ‘I’m going to go out there and I’m going to try and coach and win every game.’ I said great, go for it. The goal isn’t to not compete, right? The goal is you go out there, develop a culture of competing and playing hard and playing the right way.