The Brooklyn Nets are a few years removed from one of the most exciting eras in Nets history when they had Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving on the roster. During an era in which Brooklyn was able to add James Harden into the mix, the Nets were only able to get to the second round before everything fell apart. Irving maintains that there are no hard feelings.
“Me and KD are not beefing. I’m not beefing with Steve Nash. I’m not beefing with anybody, you guys. Alright? This is not personal against KD,” Irving said during a recent Twitch stream when talking about his time with the Nets (h/t to Bleacher Report’s Mike Chiari). Irving was seemingly responding to when Durant and Nash were on Nash and Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James’ “Mind the Game” podcast to discuss why their time in Brooklyn wasn’t more successful.
“Even when he tweeted back at me and he said he’s going to have the noti’s (notifications) on, I appreciate that, you guys,” Irving continued. “I appreciate the engagement. I just want to tell KD I love him, you know what I’m saying? At that moment, I’m not sure what he was thinking, but at the same time I would never, ever broadcast anything crazy. There’s so much that happened while we were in Brooklyn. There is so much spun narratives after we left Brooklyn.”
When Durant appeared on Nash and James’ podcast, the player-coach duo admitted that they tried to do the best they could under the circumstances, but that there were too many moving pieces for them to find consistency. “We got GMs going to other teams, we got coaches going to other teams, we got players forcing trades. We got Ben Simmons, his back (is messed up) like it was just so much stuff going on around us,” Durant said in part.
Heading into the 2019-20 season, the Nets acquired Durant and Irving in the same summer as the unofficial start of the next great era of Nets basketball. Many around the league expected Brooklyn to become a championship contender after Irving and Durant arrived, but that did not come to fruition. Irving provided his take on how he feels about that journey years later.