NEW YORK — Usually, media days around the NBA are a sterile soft launch for the upcoming season. Each team has its problems and joys, but on days like this, it’s just white noise preset at just right the volume; loud enough to let you know basketball is near and too inaudible to pull all that pablum apart.
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Then there are the Nets, an organization that faced one of its toughest tests of the season Monday: trying to explain what the heck happened to them this offseason. Ben Simmons, the 26-year-old All-Star 15 months removed from his last game, spoke for just the third time in his seven-plus months with the Nets, and that was an amuse-bouche to the menu of issues the team had to sort out.
The Nets’ summer, as Kyrie Irving pithily summed up, was a “kind of a clusterf—.”
There was Kevin Durant — who put in a trade request because he was worried all the “uncertainty” with the Nets could put the next years of his career at risk and then rescinded it but only after telling the team owner it was either him or the general manager and head coach — the first to speak.
General manager Sean Marks and coach Steve Nash talked a few hours later. Simmons revealed that he is healthy and cleared to play, ostensibly clearing the way for the Nets’ latest Big Three to finally debut next month.
Irving had his time at the microphone, too. He is as much the face of the Nets as Durant, and a larger part of the tumult it has faced in their three seasons together in Brooklyn. All those troubles will wash away if the Nets can finally do the one thing most thought they would when those two stars came together, and especially after James Harden joined them — win and win big. That they haven’t was an accelerant to the fires of this past summer.
Some of Durant’s desire to go, he said, was based on the issues that crept up last season, from the team losing 11 straight games when he got hurt to what he felt was a lack of accountability for others. It is what the Nets must try to solve for again this season, with Durant back in the fold after he rescinded his request and all parties reached a detente last month. But there is a paradox at the heart of his next year for the franchise: to thrive they must rely heavily on their most unreliable player.
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It was hardly subtext Monday. Instead, Irving brought out his criticisms into the open. He revealed that he came out of his contract extension talks with the Nets this offseason with the distinct impression he was seen as someone who could not be counted on. What else can explain why an All-Star like he is, with his talent, and still in his prime did not get the max again? That doesn’t happen often in the NBA.
Those questions about Irving popped often enough for him to notice. There was a lingering distrust from his decision to be unvaccinated last season, which kept him to just 29 games and short-circuited a third straight season in Brooklyn.
“I understood all the Nets’ points, and I respected it and I honored it, and I didn’t appreciate how me being vaccinated, all of a sudden, came to be a stigma within my career that I don’t want to play, or I’m willing to give up everything to be a voice for the voiceless,” he said. “And which I will stand on here and say that, that wasn’t the only intent that I had, was to be the voice of the voiceless, it was to stand on something that was going to be bigger than myself and I was going to understand probably far into the future — I don’t know when —but I’ll get back to my point in saying that there was a level of uncertainty of what this was going to look like of me coming back. And I had questions, they were answered truthfully. And that’s all I needed.”
He added, “I gave up four years, $100-and-something million deciding to be unvaccinated and that was the decision whose contract, get vaccinated or being vaccinated and there’s a level of uncertainty of your future, whether you’re going to be in this league, whether you’re going to be on this team, so I had to deal with that real life circumstance of losing my job for this decision.”
If he needed reinforcement for just how much the market for him had shrunk for him around the NBA, he received it in June as he sought out other teams he could potentially be traded to or sign with if he didn’t opt-in to the last year of his contract. He said he felt as if was nearly gone from the Nets at some point, that he had options to go somewhere else.
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“But not many,” he said. “I’ll tell you that. Because again this stigma, whether or not I want to play, whether or not I’m going to be committed to the team — which I thought was really unfair at times but also the timing was ideal to be able to put that on me because I wasn’t available. Now that I’m here and actually present on media day and not on a Zoom call and that I can take pictures and be with my teammates and connect to everybody it feels even better.”
Now, Irving proceeds with the organization. He and the Nets reached their truce this summer and set out for Year 4 together. They need each other dearly.
He is not a perfect partner next to Durant but he is a dynamic one. No one else on the Nets can score like him, can make plays like him, can destruct defenses like him; few around the league can.
But can the Nets rely on him?
It’s clear they didn’t think they could enough to give him a multi-year contract beyond 2023. For now, all they need to know is if they can count on him through June.
Marks was nothing but complimentary of Irving’s commitment throughout the summer, of the work and time he has put in coming into this season. But asked if he believes that Irving is reliable, he didn’t answer definitively. Maybe, he revealed his true thoughts later on.
Irving felt he was on the verge of an extension last summer but Marks said that talks stalled once it became clear that New York City’s vaccine mandate would prevent Irving from playing.
Irving said he felt as if he was given a clear-cut choice before the 2021-22 season: get the vaccine or don’t get a contract.
“I felt like I was forced with an ultimatum of whether or not I had a contract or not, whether or not I can be on the team or be around the team, whether or not I was vaccinated,” Irving said. “Tough conversations again that were had and we both left out of there with respect. I understood where they were coming from as an organization, Joe (Tsai), and representing the team, and also to where I was coming from. I was definitely put in that position where I had to make that decision.”
Marks denied that.
“No, there’s no ultimatums being given here,” Marks said. “Again, it goes back to wanting people who are reliable, people who are wanted here, and accountable. All of us.”
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(Photo: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)
