“I want that respect, and you do that by how you work every single day.” Having failed to get his trade away from Brooklyn, Kevin Durant has demanded more accountability from the Nets throughout the franchise.
Kevin Durant lamented that the Nets’ subpar season cost them respect throughout the NBA.
Listening to opposing players and external executives underscores just how much.
“I feel like we don’t have any respect out there on the court,” Durant said. “And that’s what I want for us: respect among the NBA community as a team on how we play on both ends of the floor, from GMs all the way down to the equipment manager.
“I want that respect, and you do that by how you work every single day. We skipped some steps in how we worked throughout the year last year because of the circumstances — vaccine mandates, people disgruntled, injuries. We could’ve kept pressing forward, and that’s what I try to do as a player. I’m not preaching something I don’t practice. I come in here, every rep matters to me, so I want everybody to feel the same way.”
Durant plunged the Nets into chaos with his trade request this summer, but few can question his talent. The Nets were 36-19 when Durant played last season, a solid 54-win pace befitting a contender, even if their work habits were said to be unbefitting a champion. But the Nets utterly capitulated in Durant’s absence — going just 8-19, a feeble 24-win pace — and that’s when many began to doubt their toughness, both mental and physical.
“I agree with what he said: They [were] soft. Just point blank, period,” said summer acquisition Markieff Morris, who spent last season with the Heat, of the Nets’ reputation around the league. “When we played against them, they were soft. Just go right up in their chest. And that’s what we did.”
The frailties Durant cited have also been on display in the early part of the pre-season. The Nets were outmuscled and outworked in Thursday’s 109-80 loss to the Heat. Durant had 22 points on 8-of-12 shooting; his teammates combined for 58 points on 21-of-61 shooting.
The NBA’s annual general manager survey drives home how far opinions on the Nets have fallen. The same executives who fawned over the Nets a year ago voted them this year as the league’s best in just one category: being unpredictable.
After getting a staggering 72 percent of the votes as the projected 2022 NBA champion, this year the Nets didn’t even crack the top five. Last season, 83 percent of general managers tabbed them to win the Eastern Conference; for 2022-23, that figure fell to seven percent, and the plurality of respondents (31 percent) picked them to finish fourth.
Even Nets GM Sean Marks, in speaking with a TV network in his native New Zealand, acknowledged, “Our window …[is] getting smaller and smaller and smaller.”
Doubt about it
Durant is about the only thing that remained constant from last year’s GM survey: He again was voted as the best small forward in the league. But while his ability is unparalleled, many worry about the spindly star’s health or long-term commitment to Brooklyn.
After sitting out all of 2019-20 rehabbing a ruptured Achilles, Durant missed 23 straight games in 2020-21 due to hamstring issues and 27 more last season, including 21 in a row due to a knee injury.
The way the Nets played in going 5-16 while Durant was sidelined due to the sprained MCL sowed doubts in the star’s mind. He has said the lack of collective fight they showed during that time led to his trade request and a subsequent ultimatum — since rescinded — that the team fired Marks and head coach Steve Nash.
Durant’s questions are well-founded. Does Nash have the ability to demand a culture of accountability? Can the Nets keep Durant, Kyrie Irving and Ben Simmons on the floor together enough to build chemistry?
Irving described the recent situation around the Nets as a “clusterf–k.”
“There was a level of uncertainty in this building, not just for last year, but for the last few years,” Irving said. “And that accountability [Durant] asked for should be available and accessible at all times. We should have that type of environment. So I echo the same sentiments, and I felt the same way. I just felt the awkwardness.
“It’s going to be a long journey ahead of us because there are those obstacles. Questions on health. The [healthiest] team wins every single year… In order to be healthy, it can’t just be physically. It has to be mentally, it has to be emotionally, and we have to have synergy as a team where we understand our highs and lows, strengths and weaknesses. … We don’t know what this team is going to paint on this canvas this year as of yet.”
‘Not trying to look too far ahead’
Irving isn’t wrong about availability being the most important ability. Irving’s and James Harden’s injuries led to the Nets’ second-round loss to the eventual champion Bucks in the 2021 playoffs, the same way the Bucks are convinced not having Khris Middleton proved costly in the conference finals against the Celtics last season.
And Irving’s refusal to get a COVID-19 vaccine limited him to just 29 games last season. Although the New York COVID-19 vaccine mandates have been lifted, Irving has always been injury-prone. Having lost out on a fully guaranteed four-year, $182 million contract extension and opted in to the final year of his deal, it will be fascinating to see whether playing for maximum money in a contract year can motivate the man who’s played in just 103 of 226 regular-season games as a Net to stay on the court night-in and night-out.
Can Simmons — who missed all of last season due to mental health issues and a herniated disc in his back — give the Nets consistent play? And, perhaps most importantly, can the Nets as a whole get back to having a day-in, day-out work ethic, not taking practice or the early season lightly and presuming a deep playoff run is their right simply because of the assembled talent and big names?
“We’re not looking that far ahead,” Joe Harris said. “Last season, we had such high expectations for ourselves that we looked to the playoffs a lot even in the very beginning of the season. It felt like even in some of the games early on where we’d win, [we] felt like we weren’t winning by enough or we weren’t at the championship caliber that we had the expectation for ourselves. So a lot of the stuff now is just being as attentive and focused just on the day-to-day stuff and not trying to look too far ahead.”
Harris, who was limited to just 14 appearances last season due to an ankle injury, acknowledged Durant’s assertion that the Nets began to skip steps at practice. It was one of the former MVP’s biggest complaints behind closed doors, and has become a point of emphasis.
“When you think about championship teams, if you come in and you watch practice a lot of times, you can feel it because you know how attentive guys are, how focused they are, locked in every practice — you feel the importance of that every day,” Harris said. “Not that we weren’t doing that last year, but it was a little bit of looking down the road, feeling the loss from the previous year in the playoffs and wanting to get back to that point, and looking past some of the games that we had in the early season instead of being attentive and focused on the present.
“It’s a cliché, but it’s… a lot harder to do than you realize. So it’s something that we’re trying to be really cognizant of. … We’re having a good time [camp]. Then tomorrow we’ll have another good day, and we just keep having these building blocks that we’ll build off of. … We’re not going to take these pre-season games for granted regardless of how much time guys are playing. The whole focus is just: ‘Alright, how do we get better today?’ And then just building off of that.”
– NY Post
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