Durant, Irving and the Big Apple’s team
NEW YORK — Rod Thorn was an assistant coach in 1976 when the Nets, as they moved from the American Basketball Association to the NBA, made the oft-lamented decision to sell Julius Erving’s contract to the Philadelphia 76ers. Twenty-five years later, Thorn was the architect of the best trade in Nets history as the general manager who brought in Jason Kidd, who then led the woebegone franchise to back-to-back trips to the NBA Finals.
All of those memories, from the worst and best of a past life, came rushing back to Thorn on Sunday night. He was watching from his home in Rye, N.Y., as the Nets won their most meaningful duel yet with New York’s purportedly more glamorous basketball team — handily.
The Nets achieved, in less than four years, what the Knicks have been chasing for nearly 20: They signed two of the league’s most coveted free agents. They lured the fantasy partnership of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving to Brooklyn because Durant and Irving concluded that no other team in the NBA was better positioned to handle their star power.
“The Nets have always been second in this area, because of the history, because of Madison Square Garden, because of everything the Knicks stand for,” Thorn said in a phone interview. Recalling a stretch in which the Nets won 24 of 31 meetings between the teams, including a playoff sweep in 2004, Thorn added, “We had a much better team with Jason, but they were the Knicks.”
They still are. Only now those Knicks have to contend with a geographical rival that emerged in record time from what appeared to be the bleakest of NBA futures. Only three seasons removed from a 2161 finish in 2015-16 and under a new general manager who began the climb without the usual draft and trade assets to improve, the Nets were seen as the far more desirable destination.
The best place to merge their talents, above all, is what Durant and Irving were looking for, according to a person familiar with their plans who was not authorized to discuss them publicly. Their determination to play together proved even stronger, in the end, than many league observers expected.
The Knicks and the Nets were the two teams that could most easily accommodate the players’ salary demands, along with their shared desire to live in New York. Irving’s enthusiasm for everything else the Nets could provide the star tandem, starting with general manager Sean Marks’s playoffready roster, increasingly appealed to Durant as the 2018-19 season wore.
Irving’s fondness for the Nets, which grew throughout a season of tension and disappointment with the Celtics, is not merely an offshoot of his New Jersey childhood. It stems in part from a hard sell of the franchise to Irving by Spencer Dinwiddie, the Nets’ reserve guard, after they shared a course at Harvard in September. Dinwiddie was Irving’s classmate in a Harvard Business School program for athletes, “Crossover Into Business.”
It was there that the two players from disparate talent tiers began building the bond that led to a regular dialogue and, by Sunday, brought Dinwiddie to the Nets’ practice facility. Dinwiddie, who did not respond to a request for comment, was among the invitees summoned to join top team officials on the night Irving and Durant committed the next four seasons of their careers to the team that has spent virtually all of its 52year existence in the Knicks’ shadow.
Many rival teams had believed for months that Durant and Irving would team up next season — but that they would do so with the Knicks. In the halls of Oracle Arena, especially, fears that Durant was unfulfilled as a Warrior and talk of losing him to the Knicks were frequent topics among edgy Golden State Warriors team officials, coaches and, occasionally, players.
Across the country, Dinwiddie was “at the forefront” of the months-long push to persuade Irving to prioritize the Nets over the Knicks and to nudge Durant in the same direction, according to one person familiar with the Nets’ pursuit of Irving.
The New York Times first reported last week that the Nets also had begun to heavily recruit veteran center DeAndre Jordan, one of Durant’s closest friends, to form an incoming trio with Durant and Irving.
Some around the league believe Durant’s recent Achilles’ tendon tear, more than any James L. Dolan-related ineptitude, is what doomed the Knicks. One former NBA All-Star, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss his colleagues’ plans, said Durant and Irving already were mentioning the Nets’ attractiveness as a free-agent alternative to the Knicks before the end of the regular season.
Yet it also is true that the Nets needed to secure Irving’s keen buy-in to then get Durant’s. That was the only sure way to persuade Durant, a two-time NBA Finals most valuable player, to spurn the security of a five-year, $221 million offer to return to Golden State and reject strong interest from the Los Angeles Clippers and the nowcrestfallen Knicks.
Of course, even in the Nets’ triumph, there is no shortage of skepticism about their future.
Durant faces a daunting road back to health to hush the naysayers who question whether he can return to peak level. Irving widely was pegged as the foremost source of the toxicity in Boston’s locker room last season and will be under a microscope in his interactions with teammates and coach Kenny Atkinson to see how he affects the Nets’ vaunted chemistry — especially in Year 1 while Durant is healing.
Not that a sage like Thorn, who, at 78, still serves as a special consultant to the Bucks, can comprehend such fretting after the challenges he endured as a Net.
“The irony of it to me was that both the Knicks and the Nets were after these players,” Thorn said. “And the Nets got them.Wow.”