Durant and Nets are most compelling team in NBA
NEW YORK — It was just eight months ago that the Nets were getting swept out of the first round of the playoffs by the Celtics. At the end, let’s face it, it looked as if the Celtics could have finished the job with a wet mop. Ben Simmons wasn’t playing, and no one was sure he would play again. Kyrie was Kyrie, after a season he helped sabotage in the first place, and spectacularly, by not getting vaccinated for COVID.
And even after all that, the Brooklyn Nets were just getting started. All of a sudden Kevin Durant, the best basketball player to ever play for a New York City team (sorry, Clyde, sorry Doc) didn’t want to play in Brooklyn anymore. He wanted to leave the Nets the way he left the Warriors after going to them for easy rings.
Then Kyrie got himself jammed up, and big time, on social media because of a wingnut racist movie. Then he did what he often does and got himself into more trouble by talking about all that, and before he was good and suspended. Steve Nash wasn’t suspended. He was fired. And put me down as somebody who thought at the time the Nets had become the richest and most talented clown car in the NBA; that it was time for Durant and for the Nets to move on from Kyrie Irving, as much talent as he has, and the way he can sometimes make his game look ridiculously easy.
Now here they are.
Here are your Brooklyn Nets, playing as well as any team in the league, making a run at the firstplace-in-the-conference Celtics. They may be a team that basketball fans outside New York City — and frequently within the city limits — love to hate.
But they have once again made themselves a team to watch, and perhaps the team to watch right now in professional basketball.
At a time when their league very much needs a compelling narrative, the Nets are it, like it or not. Hate them or not. Not only is Durant here, he is as much of a star as he has ever been, in the thick of the MVP conversation with Luka and Jokic and Giannis and Ja. LeBron James, who turned 38 on Friday, is still playing like a huge star himself. But he is with the Lakers. And as much as a joke as the Nets had turned themselves into a couple of months ago, here is something that is no joke:
You better believe LeBron would rather be where Durant is right now, which means the Barclays Center, Brooklyn, N.Y., than where he is.
Can the Nets sustain this for six more months? Who knows? Never forget that they’re still the Nets, and that Kyrie is still Kyrie, and that it could take hardly anything to get them off the rails.
For now, though, they have shocked all of us who wrote them off. Jacque Vaughn, who replaced Nash, came into this weekend with a 21-7 record as Nets coach. Since taking over, no coach in the league has done a better job than Vaughn has. He has done what top managers in sports are supposed to do, especially when they have the kind of talent in the room that the Nets have, which means he has gotten them to play together.
And, over the din that has so often defined the Nets of Kevin and Kyrie, he has gotten them to listen, and buy in. And actually be accountable.
“It is belief and that’s a huge part of the NBA,” Vaughn said the other day. “Is the confidence and belief, no matter what situation you can come out on the other side.”
For now — and you always have to qualify things that way with this particular team, never looking too far ahead — he has got the Nets to shut up and just ball.