If Durant, Irving and Nets can’t win now, then when?
NEW YORK — Let’s get something straight with the Nets:
This isn’t about one of them. This is about both of them. All of them really. The whole Brooklyn Nets thing.
It starts with Kevin Durant and Dr. Kyrie Irving, of course. Package deal, just like always. They came here together, for big change, with big expectations, and immediately became favorites to give the Nets their first title since the American Basketball Association.
Both have been great in Brooklyn sometimes, even when they’ve been together on the court. For now they remain the most famous 1-2 punch in basketball history that hasn’t won anything.
And might not ever.
There are reasons, everybody knows that.
Durant was still recovering from his Achilles injury when he signed. Irving got hurt in the playoffs last season, then Durant’s sneakers toes were on the line when he could have beaten the Bucks in Game 7. So the conference semis was as far as they got.
They’re supposed to do better this time, more than somewhat.
Because you start to get the idea that if they don’t win this year, they never will. Durant is getting older and Irving never stays anywhere for long, whether he’s in the penalty box for being an anti-vaxxer or not.
So for the last time, from the cheap seats at the Barclay Center (there are some, right?), if not now for the Nets of KD and Kyrie and Steve Nash and Sean Marks, the real leader of the band, then when? When do they actually take a shot at becoming the city’s team instead of its Other Team.
Understand this about the Nets as they get ready for Game 1 against the Celtics in Boston: Even with KD and Irving healthy and Irving eligible to play home games, the Celtics would be the favorites if their best big man, Robert Williams, was available to them from the start of this series.
It is the Celtics who have been as good as any team in the league, including the Suns, since they got hot in January. And it’s the Nets who have acted as if the regular season doesn’t count.
And understand something else: The Celtics believe that their two best guys — Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown — are as much of a 1-2 punch as Durant and Irving. And even though the Celtics made it to the Eastern Conference finals against the Heat in the NBA’s bubble year, there is the growing feeling around the league that Tatum and Brown have now officially come into their own, at a point in both their careers when many great players do just that.
The Celtics also do something that the Nets never do, which means they play defense. They don’t act as if getting a stop more than a few times per quarter is somehow beneath them.
They weren’t favorites to do anything, as the Nets were, when the season started, especially before James Harden got tired of playing with Kyrie. The Celtics were just slogging along in early January. Then they got hot and ended up with the No. 2 seed among all those good teams bunched together at the top of the Eastern Conference.
And you know who neither Durant nor Irving wants to see coming his way when the Nets have the ball? Marcus Smart, who plays more defense than all of Nash’s guys combined.
Everything else the Nets have done on their way to being the No. 7 seed is just the undercard to what starts in Boston, where Kyrie went to chase a title after leaving LeBron. If the Nets can’t win this series, if they can’t even make the second round with Durant and Irving playing the kind of big games they came to New York to play, then why would anybody think it’s going to get better for them next season?
We’ve talked about this all season when we weren’t talking about Irving’s self-indulgent, self-absorbed position on vaccines: First, he and Durant were going to be one of those NBA super teams.
Then the Nets went and got Harden from Houston, and they were going to be more super. Then they traded Harden away, and got Ben Simmons in return, and Vegas still had them as some kind of favorite, even though no one knew when Simmons might play then and doesn’t yet know.
For all the attention they have gotten and all the hype they have generated, and even though they sometimes carry themselves as having done more than they actually have, you know how many playoff series the Nets have won since Durant and Irving got to Brooklyn?
One.
Last year.
First round.
Against the same team they’ll play in Game 1 on Sunday.