KD Will Get His Nets Tribute Video, And Then We Can All Move On
It wasn’t like Monday was such a slow sports news day. Sunday’s exciting NFL Championship Games were worthy of continued analyses, the league’s coaching/management carousal was still revolving, and, for the few of us Nets fans, the polarizing Ben Simmons was set to make his return to the court after missing 38 games due to a recurring back injury (and it was triumphant!).
Yet the predominant takes on my all-sports Twitter feed on Monday were about Taylor Swift conspiracies and whether Kevin Durant would get a “tribute video” on Wednesday during his first trip back to Brooklyn a year after his request to be traded to Phoenix.
What nonsense. I’ll leave the first topic to certain fringe segments of society who believe aliens are running the world. As for Durant, OF COURSE he deserves, and will likely get, a minute-long video during a TV timeout that memorializes his short-lived tenure as a Brooklyn Net. The team gave one to Bruce Brown, for heaven’s sake.
If the video is intended to depict an actual portrayal of KD’s three-plus seasons here, there should be a few seconds interspersed through the segment where he’s seen in street clothes. But it will also include many wonderful basketball highlights.
That should be celebrated…and then, can we please move on?
Durant’s—and Kyrie Irving’s—arrival in the summer of 2019 signaled a seismic shift in how Brooklyn was viewed in the NBA universe. The franchise was beyond irrelevant for years. Think the Pistons without the hope that comes with owning first-round draft picks. Somehow, the organization’s rebuild to that point put them a tad above mediocrity, which was just far enough to attract the NBA’s top superstars.
Durant, though, was damaged goods at the time, the victim of a torn Achilles suffered in Game 5 of the NBA Finals. The Nets were willing to put him on sabbatical, which included the season’s postponement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, just so they could get the remaining three years on his contract.
If you recall, there were many naysayers who considered that too was a fool’s deal. After all, the specific nature of that injury saw few NBA players who had been able to return to their previous form. My view then was that even if KD was never going to be the same athletically, he could still be a prime Dirk Nowitzki type who could always use his “nearly” 7-foot size to shoot over defenders, which was worth the max contract.
Oh, but he was so much more. Could anyone tell if he even lost a half-step? He averaged a ninth-best 26.9 points per game in 2020-21 and came within four missed free throws of the rarefied 50/40/90 air. The following season, he was even more dominant, averaging just a fraction under 30 points per game and setting a career high with 6.4 assists per game. That season, it was five missed three-pointers that kept him under 50/40/90.
Unfortunately, Durant continued to be injury-prone, missing an aggregate of 64 of Brooklyn’s 154 games those first two seasons. When he played, the Nets went 59-31, for a .656 winning percentage, which would have beaten any previous record during the franchise’s NBA history. They were 34-30 without him.
He was on track for another round of outstanding production last season. The Nets, having set aside the failed Steve Nash Head Coach experiment in favor of Jacque Vaughn, went on a 20-4 run into January. Then another Durant injury, this time an MCL sprain in his left knee during a thrilling win at Miami, doused the euphoria.
He never played another game in a Brooklyn uniform again.
That Durant signed a four-year contract extension in the summer of 2021 wasn’t ever going to matter in this new era of player empowerment. Once a team goes off in a direction that their star dislikes, the player often can engineer his exit.
The Nets actually started their implosion a year earlier with the decision to accommodate James Harden’s trade request to Philadelphia, which returned Brooklyn the anvil contract of the perpetually injured Simmons. When KD’s buddy Irving asked out in February 2023 and was granted a trade to Dallas, everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Durant, who rescinded a trade request the previous summer, would be gone too.
The distastefulness of the end, however, shouldn’t diminish how Nets fans feel about having the opportunity, as limited as it was, to witness the greatness of one of the league’s best players of all time. I personally felt privileged to have been in the building for the games when, for instance, Durant floored Daniel Gafford with one of the deadliest crossovers I’ve ever seen, sending the Washington crowd into a frenzy. Or when he torched the Knicks for 53 points to lead a short-handed Nets squad to a win.
Of course, Durant’s most brilliant performances occurred during the 2021 NBA Playoffs. He whetted our appetites when he averaged a mere 32.6 points per game with a 54.6/50/91.5 shooting split in Brooklyn’s five-game victory over Boston in the first round. Against Milwaukee in the Eastern Conference Semifinals, he went absolutely nuts.
In Games 5 and 7, with Irving sidelined due to an ankle injury and Harden hobbled by a hamstring strain, Durant played every minute in each game, totaling 97 points, and came within a toenail of eliminating the eventual NBA Champions with a high degree of difficulty buzzer-beating jumper. To this day, the Bucks will tell you that they thought they were done.
I’m sure there will be plenty of Nets fans who will boo Durant on Wednesday night, as is their right. Not that it’s any of my concern, but I think his legacy will take a hit for how this all went down.
Still, he deserves to be recognized. Hopefully, it will serve as some sort of closure. Nets fans have had a hard time in these last 12 months coping with the reality that this is no longer a competitive team and that luring that right fit of a transformational superstar is really hard. It serves no purpose to rehash the events that went down when the Nets actually had him.