Left to right: Kevin Durant, smiling; James Harden, sort-of smiling;
and Kyrie Irving, not smiling. A metaphor for the "era"?
February 8, 2023: The Brooklyn Nets, having assembled a "superteam" with the goal of winning an NBA Championship, finish a complete surrender in 3 days. Even by the standards of the biggest joke franchise in the NBA, this was embarrassing.
NOTE: While these entries are dated 2022, I decided to backdate the posting dates of events from 2023 onward to the same date in 2022.
The "superteam" idea had worked before. It worked for the Boston Celtics, as Kevin Durant and Gary Payton were brought in to join Paul Pierce, and they won the NBA Championship in 2008. It worked for the Miami Heat, as Payton, LeBron James and Chris Bosh were brought in to join Dwyane Wade, and they won the Championship in 2012 and '13. And it worked for the Golden State Warriors, who brought Durant in to join Steph Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson, and they won the Championship in 2017 and '18.
But assembling a superteam has also failed. It failed for the Los Angeles Lakers, as Payton (2 out of 3 ain't bad, I suppose) and Karl Malone were brought in to join Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, and they lost the 2004 NBA Finals to a Detroit Pistons team which, at this writing, has seen only one of its players elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame: Ben Wallace.
The Nets -- on Long Island, in New Jersey, and now in Brooklyn -- have always been in the shadow of the New York Knicks, even when the Nets have been good and the Knicks have been bad. The Nets had a new arena in Brooklyn, the Barclays Center; and relatively new leadership in owner Joseph Tsai, general manager Sean Marks, and head coach Jacque Vaughn.
On July 6, 2019, the Nets signed Kyrie Irving as a free agent. Irving had helped LeBron and the Cleveland Cavaliers win the 2016 NBA Championship, but the 2 men fell out over Kyrie's bad attitude, and Kyrie was traded to the Celtics. There, too, he alternated between brilliance and mopery. When his contract ran out, they didn't lift a finger to re-sign him. The Nets signed him.
The very next day, the Nets got Durant from the Warriors in a trade. In addition to the 2017 and '18 titles with Golden State, Durant and James Harden had gotten the Oklahoma City Thunder into the 2012 NBA Finals, but lost to the Heat. With both Irving and Durant, the Nets were supposed to be contenders for the NBA Championship.
It didn't work out that way, although it wasn't all their fault. Durant was still dealing with the Achilles heel that cost the Warriors the 2019 Finals against the Toronto Raptors, and missed the entire 2019-20 season. Then, in March, that season was interrupted by the COVID pandemic. When the NBA started up again in August, it canceled the rest of the regular season, and went right to the Playoffs. Between the shutdown and earlier injuries, Irving only played 20 regular-season games. The Nets were the 7th seed in the Eastern Conference, and were swept by the Raptors in the 1st round.
Due to Durant's injury, the early exit wasn't totally unexpected. Durant would be back for 2020-21, and that was the season in which the Nets were supposed to go for it. They certainly tried: On January 13, 2021, they made a trade with the Houston Rockets, and got Harden, one of the game's top scorers at the time.
Now, the Nets had a "Big Three": Irving, Durant and Harden, with 7 Finals appearances and 3 titles between them. Surely, this combination would be enough to close a season with the 16 wins necessary to get through the Playoffs and win the NBA Championship.
Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant and James Harden. They played a grand total of 16 games together. And it wasn't just due to injuries. With COVID still an issue, Irving refused to get vaccinated, and, by the law of the City of New York, the Nets could not even allow him in the arena. Then, after the law was lifted, Irving hurt his teammates by exposing them to him, and thus possibly to COVID, thus risking their lives.
This led Frank Isola, who covers the Nets for the New York Daily News, and is a regular panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, to call Irving "the worst teammate in the history of sports." Given the circumstances, it's hard to argue. He made Stephon Marbury look like Magic Johnson.
And Irving couldn't get along with Harden. Still, the Nets got the 2nd seed in the East for the 2021 Playoffs. They beat the Celtics in 5 games, but then lost to the Milwaukee Bucks in 7 games. At first glance, it doesn't look particularly shameful. The Nets did win the 1st 2 games in Brooklyn, but, Cliché Alert, and this cliché is especially used in the NBA: The series isn't "over" until the home team loses at least once. Led by Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Bucks won the next 2 in Milwaukee.
The Nets won Game 5 in Brooklyn, and the Bucks won Game 6 in Milwaukee. But in Game 7, in Brooklyn, the Bucks won in overtime. Durant scored 48, but Giannis scored 40, and the Bucks were just a little bit better, and went on to win the title.
Losing to that Bucks team was not, by itself, a terrible thing. Certainly, pushing a team that eventually won the title to a Game 7 suggests both some talent and some character. But losing a Game 7 at home always looks bad, especially in regard to character.
Cliché Alert: The window was closing. Except Nets management didn't know it. Irving still couldn't get along with Durant. So, on February 10, 2022, the Nets made a "my headache for your headache trade." They sent Harden to the Philadelphia 76ers for a package that included the talented but troubled star Ben Simmons. Simmons had missed the entire season to that point, with a back injury and, it was suggested, mental health issues. (Only he knows for sure what was going on.) So now, the Nets' Big Three was Irving, Durant and Simmons. Except Simmons wasn't available for the 2022 Playoffs.
As in 2020, the Nets were missing one of their Big Three, and only got the 7th seed in the East. As in 2020, they were easily beaten by the Celtics. But for 2022-23, all 3 -- Irving, Durant and Simmons -- were supposed to be healthy and ready to go.
Except Irving was whining his way through the season again. As always, bursts of brilliance, which suggested that he knew he was in his "contract year," were followed by sloughs of indifference, which suggested that he didn't care -- not about his future earnings, not about where he wanted to play in 2023-24 and beyond, and certainly not about his current teammates. Durant had demanded to be traded. And the Nets were 32-22, 5th in the East.
Finally, Irving demanded a trade. There were suggestions from basketball media pundits that they shouldn't give in to his demand before today's trading deadline, and instead should put him on the spot. Instead, on February 6, 2023, the Nets caved: They sent Irving and Markieff Morris to the Dallas Mavericks for Spencer Dinwiddie, Dorian Finney-Smith, and 3 draft picks for 2027 or later.
And then, on February 8, the surrender was made complete: The Nets traded Durant to the Phoenix Suns. The Suns reached the Finals in 2021, and were one of the favorites to do so again. Once again, the Nets seemed to be vying with the NBA's other "little brother franchise," the Los Angeles Clippers, for the titles of the league's biggest underachiever and its biggest joke franchise.
The Nets didn't even get a Division title out of their superteam experiment. There's not one banner that can be hung in the rafters of the Barclays Center as a reminder of anything good that Big Three I (Irving-Durant-Harden) or Big Three II (Irving-Durant-Simmons) accomplished, because they didn't accomplish anything beyond a 2 seed. Ain't no banners, trophies or parades for that.
The Nets' most recent banner remains the one for their 2006 Atlantic Division title. That was 17 years ago. They were still playing home games at the Meadowlands. Not one member of that team is still playing, in any professional league, anywhere in the world.
Somebody asked online, "How did this become such a trainwreck? There was soooo much promise.... "
Bringing Kyrie in, all by itself, made it a promise they had no chance of keeping. I was a Nets fan for their entire 35 years in New Jersey. I left them after they left me, when they moved to Brooklyn in 2012. I knew they would fail in their superteam bid, because that's what the Nets always do: They fail. But I didn't know they would surrender so spectacularly, and so fast.
On February 9, on ESPN's First Take, Stephen A. Smith called the Nets "the biggest failure in NBA history." On Around the Horn, Isola once again called Irving "the worst teammate in the history of sports."
Around the Horn aired on ESPN weekdays at 5:00 PM Eastern Time from 2002 to 2025. It was followed at 5:30 by Pardon the Interruption, which is still on the air. That show's co-hosts also weighed in on the day after the Nets traded Durant. Tony Kornheiser is a native of Long Island, where the Nets played from 1968, when he was in college at the State University of New York at Binghamton, to 1977, when he covered the New York Nets for the local newspaper Newsday. He compared the current Nets to mythology, citing both the Bible, calling what the team engaged in to "a sin of pride"; and the ancient Greeks, saying that, like Icarus, "They flew too close to the Sun, and got burned."
It was a great turn of phrase for Kornheiser, who often refers to having been an English major. But he got the cause of Icarus' death wrong: Icarus was the son of Daedalus, who made a set of wings, and flew, and the son asked the father to make him a set of wings, too. He did, but warned Icarus not to fly too high. He did, and as he got too close to the Sun, the wax holding the wings together melted, and Icarus fell to his death. So it was somewhat appropriate that Durant went to a team named the Suns.
And co-host Michael Wilbon, a Chicago native who covered a true superteam in the 1990s Chicago Bulls, and who, along with ESPN correspondent and former Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan, probably knows more about basketball than any living person not a player or a coach, said of Irving, "He's a great basketball player when he feels like it, which is not all the time." Wilbon is known for his bluntness, so, by his standards, this was putting it politely.
Upon his arrival in Dallas, Irving said, "To me, personally, just sitting in this seat today, I just know I want to be places where I'm celebrated, and not just tolerated, or just kind of dealt with in a way that doesn't make me feel respected. And there were times throughout this process, when I was in Brooklyn, where I felt very disrespected."
These are the words of a man who refused to do what it took to make himself even eligible to literally show up. And then, when he became eligible again, he metaphorically refused to show up on many an occasion.
There have been 4,374 men who have played at least 1 regular-season game in the National Basketball Association from its 1st game on November 1, 1946 through the date of the Durant trade, February 8, 2023. Of those, Kyrie Irving is the one with the least justification to talk about respect.
The Nets got the 6th seed. They were swept in the Playoffs by the 76ers, including Harden. Durant and the Suns reached the Western Conference Semifinals, where they lost to the Nuggets. Irving and the Mavericks did not make the Playoffs. The Nuggets ended up winning the title.
*
February 8, 2023 was a Wednesday. Baseball and football were out of season. There were 9 games in the NBA:
* The Boston Celtics beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 106-99 at the TD Garden in Boston.
* The Washington Wizards beat the Charlotte Hornets, 118-104 at the Capital One Arena in Washington. Kristaps Porziņģis scored 36.
* The Miami Heat beat the Indiana Pacers, 116-111 at the Kaseya Center in Miami. Bam Adebayo scored 38 points.
* The Toronto Raptors beat the San Antonio Spurs, 112-98 at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. Pascal Siakam scored 37 points.
* The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Detroit Pistons, 113-85 at the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse (now the Rocket Arena) in Cleveland.
* The Sacramento Kings beat the Houston Rockets, 130-128 at the Toyota Center in Houston. Jalen Green scored 41 points in defeat.
* The Minnesota Timberwolves beat the Utah Jazz, 143-118 at the Delta Center (then named the Vivint Arena) in Salt Lake City, Utah.
* The Dallas Mavericks beat the Los Angeles Clippers, 110-104 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
* And the Portland Trail Blazers beat the Golden State Warriors, 125-122 at the Moda Center in Portland, Oregon. Damian Lillard scored 33 points. In defeat, Jordan Poole scored 38, and Klay Thompson 31.
There were 2 games in the NHL. The New York Rangers beat the Vancouver Canucks, 4-3 at Madison Square Garden. And the Dallas Stars beat the Minnesota Wild, 4-1 at the American Airlines Center in Dallas.
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