This is a basketball calamity, a basketball catastrophe, a basketball cataclysm. Ignore the spin that will be generated by all of this by all of the interested parties. Disregard the epic haul that is likely to start heading to Brooklyn sometime soon. This is not hyperbole. This is not overstatement.
This is basketball Armageddon.
Three years to the day after the Nets stunned the NBA by luring Kevin Durant to town, Durant and his business manager, Rich Kleiman, requested a trade. Three years to the day after Sean Marks, the Brooklyn boss, looked like the smartest kid in class — and didn’t exactly dissuade anyone from thinking that way — he agreed to Durant’s request. That is it. That is all.
That is horrendous. It is disastrous. Any way you cut it up.
For the Nets, it means the end of a basketball experiment that always seemed based on spec, always felt heavy on what-ifs and what-might-bes. They agreed to finance Durant’s year away from the sport as he recovered from Achilles surgery, seeing it as a small investment for a potentially huge payoff. They agreed to Durant’s terms of engagement, which included signing the mercurial Kyrie Irving and the glacial DeAndre Jordan.
In return they got two years of brilliant basketball out of Durant. But they also played three playoff series in that time, and lost two. They endured a year of chaos in 2021-22, much of it courtesy of Irving, and clearly that changed Durant’s mindset from all-in — he signed a four-year, $198 million extension less than 11 months ago, after all, a deal that still has yet to kick in — to get-me-out-of-here.
The Nets will surely receive an unprecedented return from Phoenix or Miami or some other suitor, and there will likely be some useful pieces making their way toward Brooklyn, but that wasn’t the narrative that was supposed to define the Nets. They brought Durant here to win the franchise’s first title since the final ABA Championship in 1976. Period.
It was title or bust on June 30, 2019.
It was simply bust by June 30, 2022.
But Durant doesn’t escape unscathed, either, not by a long shot. Part of the appeal of coming to Brooklyn (besides trying to replicate the “super-team” blueprint copyrighted — twice now — by LeBron James) was to reverse the label he’d been slapped with when he jumped Oklahoma City for Golden State. That maneuver stamped him a shameless front-running mercenary, a rap he couldn’t shake even after collecting bookend Finals MVPs with the Warriors.
Now he wants out of Brooklyn. Surely he has his reasons. If one of them is Kyrie — well, it was Durant the de facto GM who made Irving’s acquisition an essential part of his willingness to play at Barclays Center. If one of them is Steve Nash, who has looked overmatched (at best) and overwhelmed (at worst) in his first two years as a coach — well, it was Durant who made it plain (along with other prominent team voices) that they were less-than-enamored with Kenny Atkinson.
If one of them is a quashed belief that the Nets can actually win a championship as presently constructed? Well, he’s probably right. And if he winds up somewhere like Phoenix or Miami, he will ride the coattails of established franchise alpha dogs like Devin Booker, Chris Paul, Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo precisely as he once did Steph Curry’s, Klay Thompson’s and Draymond Green’s.
And folks like Charles Barkley — who recently argued that Durant needs a bus of his own to drive if he ever wants to be remembered among the sport’s rarefied elite — will be justified in hammering him forever.
This whole script has been star-crossed from the beginning. Irving only played 20 games in 2019-20. Irving and James Harden were both hurt against the Bucks a year later, in what was nearly Durant’s finest hour as a pro. Irving’s vaccination status hung like a dark cloud over this past season, and Harden bullied his way out of town, which culminated in a humiliating four-game sweep by the Celtics.
The lone silver lining was Durant’s brilliance across 90 regular-season games, and 16 postseason ones. No one can question his otherworldly skill. And he seemed to genuinely care about where the Nets were, and where they were going.
Until he didn’t.
Until he requested a trade, and was told his wishes would be honored, three years to the day after allowing the Nets to dream bigger and bolder than they ever had before, allowing them to believe their own hype that they were the smartest kids in the class. Now a superstar’s reputation lies in pieces and a GM’s vision lies in tatters. They will try to spin it differently. Don’t believe them. This was a fail.
An epic, historic, unmitigated fail.