Nets fans welcome Kevin Durant back with cheers
Suns forward Kevin Durant looks on against the Nets in the first half of an NBA game at Barclays Center on Wednesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
T here’s no escaping the truth.
Seeing Kevin Durant walk into the Barclays Center on Wednesday night with a smoking-hot Phoenix Suns team was more than a little painful. It was awkward. It was sad. It was an inescapable reminder of what could have been and never was.
Still, a little more than half of the fans in attendance at the Suns’ 136-120 win found a way to get past all that and cheer Durant, who scored 33 points in his first game in Brooklyn since asking to be traded nearly a year ago.
Yes, Durant chose to leave you. And yes, he still deserved to be cheered in his first game back as a visitor.
Durant remains one of the best players ever to wear a Nets uniform. The fact that his team never got past the second round of the playoffs during his tenure in Brooklyn has more to do with bad injuries, bad luck and bad behavior from teammate Kyrie Irving than anything Durant ever did.
OK, it didn’t work out. Still, the July day in 2019 that Durant and Irving announced that they were coming to the Nets, not the Knicks, remains one of the top 10 moments in Nets franchise history. And, if you take away their ABA days, it may be one of the top five.
For a good part of Durant’s 3 ½ years, the Nets were no longer the second NBA franchise in town. The Knicks still had more fans, but the Nets had better players and a legitimate chance of winning it all. When all cylinders were clicking — like during that stretch midway through last season when the Nets went 13-1 before Durant injured his knee — the Nets looked unbeatable.
The problem was there always seemed to be some untimely injury, some incredibly tone-deaf decision by Irving or a sudden trade demand by James Harden that derailed the team. During his tenure, Durant got to play a grand total of 16 games with Harden and Irving.
By contrast, Phoenix’s big three of Durant, Bradley Beal and Devin Booker have already played 17 games together in just over half a season.
Durant clearly has moved on.
“It’s just a pointless exercise to think about what could have happened,” Durant said when asked if he ever thinks about what could have happened if things had been different in Brooklyn. “What happened is what I think about. The reality of it. We didn’t have enough time together . . . At the end of the day, regardless of what went on, I still came to work.”
When you are the second team in a market, you have to swing for the fences now and then. Sometimes it works (Stephon Marbury for Jason Kidd), and sometimes it doesn’t (trading a boatload of picks for Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce).
It didn’t work out with Durant, but that wasn’t because he wasn’t a great player who gave great effort. Durant, when he was healthy, never gave less than 100%. And when he was at his best, there was no shooter more breathtaking.
In the 2021-22 season, he averaged a franchise record 29.9 points. In the 2021 Eastern Conference semifinals he had two unforgettable performances against eventual champion Milwaukee.
Durant logged 49 points, 17 rebounds and 10 assists in a Game 5 victory. He then scored 48 points in a Game 7 overtime loss that he just missed winning in regulation because his foot was inches over the three-point line.
“For me, my experience with Kevin I’ll never forget,” coach Jacque Vaughn said before Wednesday’s game. “K made me a better coach. And there’s one thing that I never, ever doubted: When I was a part of a staff or coaching him as a head coach, going into a game, he wanted to win that game.”
If Durant has any regrets, he didn’t voice them before the game. In fact, he almost looked a little wistful when the team played a short tribute video before he was introduced. “The people that follow the Brooklyn Nets, they understood what we went through and those little moments that we had and shared as a team that the fans rallied around,” Durant said.
A good portion of them refrained from booing the player they cheered for three seasons. Durant’s legacy here may be complicated, but there is no denying that he gave his all until the team began to fall apart and he asked out. Wednesday night, the fans seemed to understand that.
The bet here is they won’t be so generous next Tuesday when Irving returns.
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
