Let’s get something straight with the Nets: This isn’t about one of them. This is about both of them. All of them really. The whole Brooklyn Nets thing.
It starts with Kevin Durant and Dr. Kyrie Irving, of course. Package deal, just like always. They came here together, for big change, with big expectations, and immediately became favorites to win the Nets their first title since the American Basketball Association. Both have been great in Brooklyn sometimes, even when they’ve been together on the court. For now they remain the most famous 1-2 punch in basketball history that hasn’t won anything.
And might not ever.
There are reasons, everybody knows that. Durant was still recovering from his Achilles injury when he signed. Irving, the science guy, got hurt in the playoffs last season and then Durant’s sneakers toes were on the line when he could have beaten the Bucks in Game 7. So the conference semis was as far as they got. They’re supposed to do better this time, more than somewhat.
Because you start to get the idea that if they don’t win this year, they never will. Durant is getting older and Irving never stays anywhere for long, whether he’s in the penalty box for being a lunkheaded anti-vaxxer or not. So for the last time, from the cheap seats at the Barclay Center (there are some, right?), if not now for the Nets of KD and Kyrie and Steve Nash and Sean Marks, the real leader of the band, then when? When do they actually take a shot at becoming the city’s team, instead of its Other Team.
Understand this about the Nets as they get ready for Game 1 against the Celtics in Boston: Even with KD and Irving healthy and Irving eligible to play home games, the Celtics would be the favorites if their best big man, Robert Williams, was available to them from the start of this series. It is the Celtics who have been as good as any team in the league, including the Suns, since they got hot in January. And the Nets who have acted as if the regular season doesn’t count.
And understand something else: The Celtics believe that their two best guys — Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown — are as much of a 1-2 punch as Durant and Irving. And even though the Celtics made it to the Eastern Conference finals against the Heat in the NBA’s bubble year, there is the growing feeling around the league that Tatum and Brown have now officially come into their own, at a point in both their careers when many great players do just that.
The Celtics also do something that the Nets never do, which means they play defense; they don’t act as if getting a stop more than a few times per quarter is somehow beneath them. They weren’t favorites to do anything when the season started the way the Nets were, especially before Harden got tired of playing with Kyrie. They were just slogging along in early January. Then they got hot, and ended up with the No. 2 seed among all those good teams bunched together at the top of the Eastern Conference.
And you know who neither Durant nor Irving want to see coming their way when the Nets have the ball? They don’t want to see Marcus Smart, who plays more defense than all of Nash’s guys combined.
Everything else that the Nets have done on their way to being the No. 7 seed is just the undercard to what starts in Boston, where Kyrie went to chase a title after leaving LeBron. If the Nets can’t win this series, if they can’t even make the second round with Durant and Irving playing the kind of big games they came to New York to play, then why would anybody think it’s going to get better for them next season?
We’ve talked about this all season when we weren’t talking about Irving’s self-indulgent, self-absorbed position on vaccines: First he and Durant were going to be one of those NBA super teams. Then they went and got Harden from Houston, and they were going to be more super. Then they traded Harden away, and got Ben Simmons in return, and Vegas still had them as some kind of favorite, even though no one knew when Simmons might play then, and doesn’t yet know.
For all the attention they have gotten, and all the hype they have generated, and even though they sometimes carry themselves as having done more than they actually have, you know how many playoff series the Nets have won since Durant and Irving got to Brooklyn?
One.
Last year.
First round.
Against the team against which they play Game 1 on Sunday.
They don’t lead the league in drama. The Lakers lead the league in drama, by a lot. There was the drama about Irving’s vaccine status. There was the drama with Harden, who came and went. Now there is new drama about whether Simmons, who hasn’t been in a real game in nearly a year, might actually get back on the court. But just when there were stories going around that Simmons might parachute into the Celtics series, here came Durant to say this:
“No, I’m not expecting [Simmons] to play. That’s easier for me. I’m not putting any pressure on Ben to come out and hoop. I’m not expecting him to do anything except get his body right and get healthy as fast as he can. I’m preparing as if we’re playing with the team we have.”
But these are the Nets, an ongoing soap opera, so stay tuned, maybe even to the next round if the Nets can make it that far. As always, you wonder if Durant, who could have gone anywhere when he left the Warriors — or stayed with the Warriors — wishes he had gone anywhere except Brooklyn. He continues to say all the right things. But you watch him on the court sometimes, when Irving is the one chucking it up, and wonder what Durant is really thinking about where he chose to play out his prime.
He and Steph Curry figured it out with the Warriors and became champions. This was two of the greatest pure shooters in the history of the sport figuring it out, for the greater good. And Curry, as unselfish as he is gifted and a joy to watch, was willing to sublimate his own game the way Earl Monroe was willing to do that when he came to play with Clyde. Also for the greater good, on a team that was as much of a joy to watch as any in NBA history.
The Nets aren’t any kind of joy, at least not yet, and maybe not ever. You put up with a lot with your sports teams as long as they win. If the Nets don’t do that now, they probably never will.
ISLES LEGEND BOSSY GONE TOO SOON, BUCK WAS BEST MOVE OF OFFSEASON & COLE’S RECORD TELLS THE STORY …
In my sports writing life, there was never a better team to be around, a better locker room, than the one inhabited by the great Islander teams of the early ‘80s.
And I was lucky enough, at playoff time, to be around that locker room a lot.
They could talk, and they could laugh, they were smart, and now they have lost Mike Bossy not so long after they lost Clark Gillies, both of them gone much too soon, and much too young.
Here’s the deal on the deal that the Yankees offered Aaron Judge:
It was extremely fair.
Just not necessarily forward thinking.
Sometimes, in the modern world of sports, fair doesn’t get it done with a player you keep saying you want and need.
A year ago, Steve Cohen didn’t wait around to make a fair offer to Frankie Lindor, a player he wanted and his team very much needed.
So he didn’t just pay the man.
He overpaid.
You wonder if Cohen might not do the same down the road with Judge if he becomes a free agent.
The storyline last weekend with Tiger Woods, all over the media and social media, went pretty quickly from how he was going to win another green jacket once he showed up at Augusta National to how great it was that he first made the cut, and then finished.
The coverage kept changing almost like the cut line.
We are under a month to “Bosch: Legacy” on Amazon, and the continuation of one of the great franchises in recent television history.
And one of the great performances, by Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch.
I think Dave Roberts was right to take out Clayton Kershaw, not that you asked.
You hear a lot about culture changers in sports, and the expression gets overused.
A lot.
But Buck Showalter really is one.
And you can see it already, plain as day.
Say it again: The most important free agent acquisition of the last baseball offseason was Buck.
My friend Barry Stanton says he wishes Doug Flutie were still playing for the New Jersey Generals.
Same.
Since around the time when they started checking pitchers for sticky stuff last June, here are the numbers on Gerrit Cole:
His record is 8-5, his earned run average is 4.26 in 18 starts.
He got sick in there, and then came back strong, before fading at the end.
But as somebody, I forget who, once said:
You are what your record says you are.
One more thing about the Yankees, and the fourth game of their series against the Jays, and the way Michael King got the first save of his career after Aroldis Chapman walked the whole world in the top of the 9th:
You just can never go wrong with a Boston College man.
It’s a thing.
Google it.
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