Kyrie Irving changed the course of the Brooklyn Nets season with a trade request that saw him join the Dallas Mavericks. While the Nets got win-now pieces in Spencer Dinwiddie and Dorian Finney-Smith, they would shock the NBA by trading Kevin Durant to the Suns prior to the trade deadline.
Durant was expected to ask out and the Suns were his natural destination, but many expected that to happen over the summer instead of immediately. Unsurprisingly, Kyrie Irving’s trade request hastened the timeline for everything.
Stein details the ever-changing situation in Brooklyn after the Kyrie Irving trade request and how Durant requested a trade privately to not be the one to publicly ask out from a team twice in 8 months.
Any such public chatter in the buildup to the deadline obscured what was really happening. League sources say that Durant told the Nets shortly after Irving’s abrupt departure that he wanted to be traded immediately to Phoenix if a deal could be struck — but without the public knowing that he had requested a trade for the second time in eight months. (h/t Marc Stein)
The Durant chapter seemed dead the second Kyrie got traded but nobody expected everything to move so fast. Now Irving and KD are on rival Western teams instead of competing together in the East.
Did The Brooklyn Nets Give In Too Easily?
For a team with no future draft assets, selling on a superstar like KD on a long-term contract is quite risky. Even though they’ve accumulated assets from the Suns, the Nets get no benefit from trying to tank as most of their picks are wrapped up in the James Harden trade they made in 2021.
However, they had no choice in this matter. They knew they didn’t want to give Kyrie the contract he had asked for which would inevitably alienate Kevin Durant. Even though a half-season push could’ve been a smart option, it didn’t seem like Durant wanted to keep extending his Nets tenure after his clear dissatisfaction with the organization in the summer.
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