Can the Nets use their summer of turmoil to create a winter of basketball renewal?

NEW YORK — Comfortable being uncomfortable?

The Nets are a size 12 team trying to squeeze into a size 6 suit. You can only let out so much in the seat, you know?

Even so, given what happened in Boston and Phoenix last week, the Nets’ significant offseason turmoil has become almost quaint — even up here, where the Gotham teams’ dysfunction provide the oxygen with which the media, local and national, tends to breathe. And thus, Kevin Durant demanding a trade, then saying he’d come back if his GM and head coach were fired, with Kyrie Irving’s contract/vaccination issues continuing to make his future here uncertain, didn’t dissuade veteran players who’ve seen just about everything over the years from joining the show.

“It’s the NBA,” newly signed Markieff Morris said. “It’s something every summer that’s going to have everybody out their seats, on the edge of their seats. This is just the NBA. That’s something natural. We’ve got to be able to sell something in the summer.”

Indeed, while the challenge Brooklyn faces going forward is great, it is, of course, not unprecedented.

Other contending teams, in markets large and small, have had their own tumultuous offseasons in league history – including ones strafed by tragedy, not just trade requests. Or: may I re-introduce you to Shaq and Kobe, circa 2000-02? Or, how about 1997, when Michael Jordan and the Bulls, having won five NBA championships in their previous seven seasons, entered the 1997-98 season knowing that it would be their last together — by edict of their own management and ownership? (Someone should do a show chronicling that season someday.)

Or, how about when the shoe was on the other foot, in 2000 — when it was the team — in this case, the 76ers, at the behest of their coach, Larry Brown — that was poised to “fire” its superstar, Allen Iverson, whom Brown could no longer abide? Philly agreed to trade Iverson, as part of a four-team deal, to the Pistons — only to have Philly center Matt Geiger, who was part of the proposed deal, scuttle it by refusing to waive his 15 percent trade kicker. The kicker had to be eliminated for the wildly complicated deal to work financially.

That was a fun picture day!

And thus, like AI and LB back in the day, the Nets will have to kiss and make up. And that is far easier said than done.

But Philly’s example provides Brooklyn precedent for that not only happening, but resulting in renaissance. The following season, Iverson became league MVP, professing his love for “my coach” in the process. Philly spun a trade deadline deal in February to acquire Defensive Player of the Year Dikembe Mutombo. And the Sixers made the Finals — only to be dismissed by the Lakers, led by the dominant and aforementioned Shaq and Kobe.

Which is the point. Talent – ultimate, historical talent, like that of AI, Shaq, Kobe and KD – can always win out, even when at war within itself, if it can be brought into any kind of harmony with teammates, coaches and organization. And that is the task facing Brooklyn: how to align.

The Nets couldn’t find “like for like,” as Sean Marks, the GM, put it, for Durant, the two-time Finals MVP, 2014 league MVP and 10-time all-NBA selection. Nor could they find a deal they liked for Irving, long rumored to be near the top of LeBron James’ most desired list. And Nets governor Joe Tsai didn’t fire Marks, or coach Steve Nash. Everyone is back, to take another run at it. For now, anyway.

When I asked Durant why he believed the same group he’d found wanting in championship habits and drive just weeks ago, and which was swept in the first round by Boston, was now up to the task going forward, he said he chose to believe that their implosion last season, and the lessons learned, would ultimately bear fruit.

“It’s a year of growth, a year of us looking in the mirror, like, we (bleeped) up as a team, you know?” Durant said. “And that only makes you better. So I’m banking on that. I’ve got faith in that. We’ve got guys in this locker room that care, we’ve got people in this organization that want to see this organization be one of the prominent ones in sports. So, I’m banking on that. We’ve got competitive people in this building, so I’ve got faith in that moving forward, that we all want the same things, especially a summer of us, you know, having, basically, a standoff. That’s only going to make us better and make us more competitive and show what we can do.”

So Durant and Irving and Ben Simmons, and everyone in the black and white Nets jerseys, professed belief that what didn’t kill the Nets — or, at least what didn’t force a lopsided trade of KD to Phoenix, or Irving to the Lakers — will make them stronger.

But you can’t just snap your fingers and yell “culture, on three!” and make it so. And it doesn’t happen in one offseason, or two. Or, sometimes, five. That’s why a true culture of success is so hard not only to create, but to maintain.

It isn’t coincidence that organizations renowned for their unshakable culture have kept the same people around, for decades, to drive and demand everyone pull in the same direction. Gregg Popovich and R.C. Buford are still front and center in San Antonio. Pat Riley and Erik Spoelstra still set the agenda in Miami. And those franchises have the understanding that adherence to a team’s collective belief system won’t always wind up in championships — and, in the case of the Spurs today, won’t bring the current team anywhere near one. And that allows a franchise to get beyond a single season’s disappointments.

It truly is process over results: how people will live and work with and among one another.

In this, the Nets will have to get beyond their train wreck of an offseason. In the midst of winning two titles in Golden State, Durant saw first-hand how the Warriors dealt head-on with adversities. Irving had to mesh with James in Cleveland, and they ultimately delivered the Cavaliers the city’s first major team sports championship in five decades. Marks cut his teeth as an executive with the Spurs; Nash learned to play and compete at the highest levels with both joy and fire in Phoenix.

“I won’t speak for Steve, but I think both of us have been around some pretty high-level players, coaches, staff members,” Marks said. “… It’s got to be honest and true to what we’re trying to do here, in our culture. I can’t make this the Heat culture; I don’t want to make this the Spurs culture. I have the utmost respect for them. But this is Brooklyn, and we’ve got to do it true to us.”

Nash insisted he had no problem with Durant’s call for his ouster, that “families” fight all the time, yet ultimately unify. And he says the Nets will as well.

“I think for me, it’s fundamental to simplify,” Nash said. “So you go through a review process, you communicate and you look back on what expired and what happened. And then, you start to simplify. I think you want clear and simple actionables coming out of disappointment, or coming out of adversity. So I think that’s been the foundation of this, is to look back and try to figure out what happened – and then, don’t overcomplicate it, don’t overthink it, don’t make grandiose plans. Get back to the basic fundamentals that are clear, simple, attainable, that we can work at every single day. … all great things are usually built on simplicity.”

The Nets can, and should, also lean into vets like Patty Mills, who won a ring with the Spurs in 2014, as a member of one of the tightest teams in recent memory. It wasn’t by accident, or coincidence. Mills was, and is, a connector of people, who found his voice while becoming the leader of the Australian men’s national team, leading the Boomers to heretofore untold heights – a bronze medal at the 2020 Summer Olympics.

It cut both ways in San Antonio, with Mills famously brought to tears when Popovich, in the midst of Finals preparation in 2014, educated his team on the importance of Eddie Mabo Day among Mills’ people in Australia. Mabo, who was Mills’ great uncle, spent much of his adult life fighting for indigenous land rights for the original inhabitants of the Torres Strait, a section of land in Australia near Papua New Guinea. Soon after White settlers came to Australia, Australian courts laid down the seemingly preposterous notion that the people who were living in the Torres Strait didn’t have inheritance rights to the land upon which they lived, and that the Strait belonged to the nation, not the people living there. Mabo joined a lawsuit challenging the doctrine that Australia was “unsettled” until White immigrants arrived on the land in 1788.

Mabo and the plaintiffs won the case in 1992, just after his death at age 55.

Popovich taking the time to study his player’s history, and how taking a moment in the midst of Finals preparation would be so meaningful to Mills, creates the kind of connective tissue the Nets have been trying to create amongst themselves — and, now, may have to recreate. Mills has already tried to create moments and events that break down barriers among players.

“It’s as simple as, last season, gathering the team to walk the Brooklyn Bridge, try to bring some meaning that way, together as a team,” Mills said Monday. “Talk about what could possibly be if we win a championship, what we would do with the Larry O’Brien trophy if we did win a championship. Have a vision for it. And so it’s a lot of stuff that we spoke about, but you’ve got to be able to vision yourself, put yourself there, doing it. Because if you can’t vision it, you’re behind the 8-ball already. Taking the young boys that have never swum before in their life, and getting some swimming instructors, getting them to swim for the very first time in open ocean water. Stuff like that really brings a team together in ways that starts way before you step on a basketball court.

“It’s respecting your teammates, it’s understanding your teammates. It’s unpacking those layers to have a true, genuine connection with your teammates. I guess that’s the reason why I’m here, from a leadership standpoint, a team standpoint, what we can do to just bring more meaning and purpose to our journey. I think that’s a really powerful thing.”

It’s hard not to be skeptical that such a thing is possible, in this, Irving’s and Durant’s fourth seasons here, and Simmons’ first full one. There are so many flash points that try a team under optimum conditions: injuries (which the Nets have suffered in bunches the last three seasons), COVID outbreaks (ditto), blown defensive assignments (check), trying to perform under the brightest of lights, against the toughest opponents. But there’s still so much talent here, the capabilities and potential still so vast, that the Nets will again run it back — maybe one last time — to see if they can, as W.H. Auden wrote almost 83 years ago, about something completely different, truly come together.

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(Photo of Kevin Durant: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)

Can the Nets use their summer of turmoil to create a winter of basketball renewal?

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