The Brooklyn Nets’ Big Three era was supposed to change the NBA, but behind the scenes, cracks formed early. In a new livestream, Kyrie Irving spoke honestly about the team’s turbulent chemistry, including his misgivings about Steve Nash being named head coach. According to Kyrie, both he and Nash had private reservations about working together, and it wasn’t the seamless fit the media once hoped it would be.
“How Steve ended up becoming our head coach, I’ll let K [Kevin Durant] answer that when he’s ready,” said Kyrie. “But I already had my own thoughts on how the coaching situation was gonna go.”
Irving admitted he had preferred candidates in mind, particularly ones with proven head coaching experience. And while he gave Nash credit for what he brought from the Warriors, Kyrie didn’t hide his feelings about the hire, or the rocky journey that followed.
“We had already hashed that out, but I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like, yeah, it was all easy around everything in Brooklyn,” Irving said. “We’re in New York City, the media capital of the world, you just gotta walk a little bit different. I wasn’t ready to walk that walk, and there was a lot going on, not just in Brooklyn in general, but the Nets.”
When Irving and Durant came together in 2019, the Nets worked hard to find a coach who could bring out the most in their new big three. After much deliberation, they eventually settled on Nash, but Kyrie wasn’t convinced. By his account, it was Durant who pushed for Nash’s hire, and it’s a mistake that cost them greatly.
Nash’s coaching tenure produced a solid 94-67 record, but it lacked substance in the playoffs. The locker room soon unraveled, and he was eventually replaced by Jacque Vaughn. As great as Nash was as a player (2x MVP, 8x All-Star, 7x All-NBA), he was unsuccessful as the coach of the Nets, and his legacy will always be controversial as one of the most important figures of a failed superteam.
For Irving, Steve Nash was never the right choice, given his lack of a championship and limited coaching experience. Still, the blame for that failure goes beyond more than one individual. As Kevin Durant and Steve Nash themselves agreed, other obstacles completely doomed them from the start.
Looking back, it’s hard to pinpoint just one area where things fell apart for the Durant/Irving Nets, but it’s safe to say a series of missteps, from the front office to the locker room, left Brooklyn stripped of star power and stuck in the East’s second tier.
The Brooklyn experiment was filled with promise, but it quickly became a case study in how not to build a superteam. For all their talent, the Nets lacked cohesion, consistency, and the leadership needed to manage big personalities on an even bigger stage. With Kyrie now reflecting on what went wrong, it’s clear the wounds haven’t fully healed, and that the fallout from those years in Brooklyn still lingers in NBA conversations today.
