A few months ago, Nets star Kevin Durant was hell-bent on forcing himself out of Brooklyn after two disappointing seasons with the team.
But after trying, and failing, to force his team’s hand, Durant had no other choice but to return to the Nets and suit up for the upcoming season.
This week, the Brooklyn swing man spoke out on his return to Brooklyn for the first time and revealed what it was that brought him back.
“I felt like we had a good team, Durant told reporters. “I felt like this is the place I said I wanted to be. We started to set something up in the future to be a solid team. So to be honest I thought this was still a great option, too.”
Kevin Durant Explains Why He Believes The Nets Can Still Compete For A Title
Looking ahead to the upcoming season, Durant did not show any signs of giving up. In fact, he expressed a lot of faith and optimism about how far they can go.
“When you look at the grand scheme of things, we haven’t been healthy at all for two years. Each playoffs we didn’t have major guys … So when you got $50 million dollars on your bench this last playoffs with Joe and Ben … I want to see what our team looks like in full.”
KD: "When you look at the grand scheme of things, we haven't been healthy at all for two years. Each playoffs we didn't have major guys … So when you got $50 million dollars on your bench this last playoffs with Joe and Ben … I want to see what our team looks like in full."
— Nick Friedell (@NickFriedell) September 30, 2022
The Nets endured unprecedented levels of turmoil this summer, and it’s hard to imagine how any team comes back from that.
To make matters worse, there are questions about next season as well given Kyrie Irving’s impending free agency.
In truth, nothing is guaranteed for the Nets and they are still probably coder to collapse than we think.
Regarding KD specifically, we don’t know what his next live is. In fact, we only recently just found out why he requested a trade from the Nets in the first place.
“It was a lot of uncertainty around our team last year. I committed to this organization for 4 years last summer with the idea that we were gonna be playing with that group that we kinda went on that little round, went to the second round with. I felt like another year of that, us being healthy we were building something towards the future. So then as the season went on, you seen what happened with our season. Guys in and out of the lineup, injuries, just a lot of uncertainty which filled some doubt in my mind about the next 4 years of my career. I mean I’m getting older, I want to be in a place that’s stable and try to build a championship culture so I had some doubts about that. I voiced them to Joe (Tsai) and we move forward from there.”
It remains to be seen how the Nets will recover from such a wild period, but they have enough talent to make some noise just as they are.
It will be interesting to see how long all those guys are able to stay bought-in.
