Laugh at the Nets, but they gave their fans a chance at a title

NEW YORK — There is this narrative, now that the Nets have blown things up again, now that Kevin Durant is in Phoenix and Kyrie Irving is in Dallas, that this version of the Nets, the one that began when Durant and Irving got to Brooklyn, is one of the great disaster movies in the history of New York sports. Especially now that it ends the way we always suspected it would, which means badly.

Only it’s not some Titanic-like failure, even though Durant and Irving finally played just 74 games together in Nets uniforms. It’s not that kind of failure for this one big reason, as much of a clown car as they could sometimes be, and as easy a target as they are right now:

As brief as this all was, and sometimes you feel as if you had blinked you would have missed the whole thing, the Nets did the one thing that fans ask their teams to do, here or anywhere:

They gave them a chance.

And did something else in the process:

Became the only basketball team in the city who was an actual title contender in this century. This isn’t about the two NBA Finals the Nets played when they were still playing in Jersey. This is about the Brooklyn Nets. This is actually about this season’s Brooklyn Nets, where they were one month ago on the night in Miami, Jan. 8, when Durant limped off the court with 36.6 seconds left in the third quarter of a game his team would end up winning by a point, 102-101, without him.

You know want to know where the Nets were that night? Second place in the East, one game behind the Celtics in the standings. The Celtics were 28-12. The Nets, who had just won 18 of their last 20 games, who had survived more Kyrie drama because of that link to an antisemitic movie and his ensuing suspension, were 27-13.

And at that basketball moment in time, certainly the moments before Durant got hurt, they were looking like as much of a contender as anybody in their conference or in their league.

You know what the Knicks haven’t been in more than 20 years? That.

The Knicks weren’t a contender that night, even though they were just a few games behind the Nets in the standings. They aren’t a contender now. As easy as it is to make fun of the Nets of Joe Tsai and Sean Marks — and Lord, they do make that a layup sometimes — they at least took their big swing with Durant and Irving and James Harden, before he decided he didn’t like it in Brooklyn before Durant and Irving did. You bet they swung and missed at the end. The Knicks? They never even get to the plate. They never had a chance at Durant the way they never had a chance at LeBron James before he took his talents to South Beach.

The Knicks absolutely made it to the conference semis in 2013, but even if they had gotten past the Pacers in the second round, they weren’t going to beat LeBron and the Heat in the next round, as well as they’d played them in the regular season that year. No one looked at them for one minute and saw a championship team. It was different with the Nets two years ago, and looked different this year until Jan. 8.

Now Durant and Irving are gone. Everybody knows about all of it with the Nets: Irving and the vaccine and the way the Nets rolled over for him and Durant wanting to be traded in the summer of ’22 the way Irving decided he wanted to be traded in February of ’23; the way they essentially ran Steve Nash, who turned out not to be up to the circumstances of the occasion, right out of Brooklyn.

They did turn into a clown car early this season. Only then they started to play, and showed you how much game they had when they did. Once again the Brooklyn Nets had what the Knicks haven’t had, truly, since they made it to the Finals of ’99 against the Spurs:

A shot.