Kevin Durant has reflected on the bad things the Brooklyn Nets had to endure in recent times and how they survived through all of that. Their patience and sacrifice have paid off now, and the team is looking like an actual championship contender.
Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving were, at different points, linked with a move away from the Brooklyn Nets. This team has gone through some rough patches since KD and Ky arrived in 2019. Having two of the most polarizing NBA superstars on the same team didn’t look like a good idea for many, but the Nets were confident in their duo.
Almost four years since that moment, their best performance in the playoff was a second-round elimination in 2021 when the eventual champions Milwaukee Bucks took them out in a thrilling 7-game series.
Kevin Durant And Kyrie Irving Were Really Close To Leaving Brooklyn Nets
Following another disappointing exit last season, the Nets found themselves in a complex position when their two best players were really close to leaving the organization for different reasons.
First, Durant requested a trade from the team, as he didn’t feel they were going in the right direction. As for Kyrie Irving, he was close to being cut after making a huge mistake on social media, which earned him criticism and being called ‘anti-Semite’.
The Nets survived both these situations and are now fully focused on basketball. Kevin Durant recently talked about this process with Nick Friedell of ESPN, revealing why things didn’t fall apart between Kyrie and the rest of the team.
Why didn’t things splinter apart after all the Kyrie [Irving] stuff — why have you guys come back together now when things could have easily exploded?
Because we was together regardless. I think coming into the training camp, we understood that it’s going to be a lot on us from a media standpoint, from just the noise in general around our team, so I think that made us tighter once camp started. So we was able to take the Kyrie stuff and move in stride because we were already stuck together before that. We started to win some games, started to get better as a team, and do some things out there that work for us. And now it seems like everything was patched all together, but it felt like it was always cool, to be honest.
Moreover, he talked about his decision to request a trade and then withdraw it, explaining that he wanted to feel that the rest of the team was willing to go through hell to win a championship, and that’s what convinced him to give it another run.
Over the summer, when you decided to come back, why were you so confident that you guys still could compete for a title?
I don’t even look at s— that way. My whole thing was like — are we, does the process matter to us? And that’s one thing I did know that people here enjoy, grinding. So that was the most important thing for me. Titles and stuff come with the process in which you — how you prepare. It was more so, “All right, are we going to practice harder? Are we going to pay more attention to detail?” Not just everybody else, all of us, me included. Is that going to be preached to us every day? I had the faith that that would happen because I voiced that throughout the summer as well. Even behind the scenes, like, “Yo, this is what I like to do. This is how I like to practice.” I’ve been saying that for the last couple years, so I figured at that point with me going through that, they understood what I value. That’s what I was hanging my hat on, the preparation side of it.
Durant’s patience is paying off, as he’s happy with the team under Jacque Vaughn. The Nets boast one of the best records in the NBA and recently won 12 straight games. They’re one of the hottest teams in the league right now, and Vaughn has played a big role in that.
With KD and Kyrie locked in now, this team looks really dangerous, but we need to wait and see if everybody made the right decision by staying on the Nets and running it back this campaign.
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