It has been three years since Kevin Durant made his career-altering decision to leave the Warriors’ dynasty and join up with Kyrie Irving to start a new superpower with the Brooklyn Nets. So far, however, they’ve failed. The Nets are further away from an NBA championship than ever before under the KD-Kyrie reign.
The Brooklyn Nets under KD and Kyrie must be the strangest, most dysfunctional NBA team (perhaps aside from the Lakers) in the NBA today. Whenever you turn on ESPN or FS1 or whatever channel you watch basketball on, there is always a Brooklyn Nets dysfunction story.
Whether it is James Harden no longer gets on with KKD and Kyrie and wants out, or Kyrie has missed yet another game in only a way Kyrie can, or the whole Ben Simmons no-show in the playoffs, there is always something disastrous happening in Brooklyn.
Perhaps it is a New York curse. The Brooklyn Nets may be dysfunctional, but the New York Knicks are dysfunctional and bad. Ther must be something in the water over in NYC for both their basketball teams to be this dysfunctional all the time.
Anyway, back to the Nets. Their main problem is it seems that their superstars either are always injured, or just simply don’t want to play basketball in Brooklyn. Take, for example, Kevin Durant.
He has always been a consummate professional (at least on the court), always showing up and giving his maximum effort in the games he plays. Yet, with each season, it seems like KD has been getting more and more injury prone. It does the Nets no good to have a dedicated, hard-working player who can only play in 60-75% of games each season.
Yet, KD is the good example. If you look at Kyrie, you get a totally different picture. He’s a super talent player, capable of being one of the very best guards in the NBA today. But he rarely applies himself fully to whatever team he is on.
He is often missing games through “soreness injuries” or just downright missing them because he refuses to play (remember when choose to party at his sister’s birthday, rather than play; and his NBA-vaccination issues).
With James Harden gone, the third member of the Brooklyn “Big-3” goes to Ben Simmons. Although, he has actually yet to play a minute for the Nets.
His continual back injury saga has kept him sidelined throughout the entire 2021/22 NBA season and postseason. However, it seems there is more to this Simmons injury story than just a “back injury”.
With what has come out of the Nets and Simmons camp, it seems that Simmons is dealing with a serious confidence/mental health issue, so I won’t criticism him for sitting out.
Those types of issues are very hard to overcome, especially with the added pressure an All-Star basketball player deals with on a daily basis. Still, if he can’t play next year either, the Nets should be really worried that Simmons might never play for them at all.
This KD-Kyire Nets experiment has gone awry really since it started, and it looks like it won’t get much better next season. With Kyrie’s contact running out at the end of next season, if the Nets can’t go far in the playoffs, they might want to look to restart this project around KD alone.
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