What I pictured every time I saw the Nets in person this season: a dark, long runway lit up by one big spotlight and out onto it came, one at a time, everyone on that roster.
Here was Blake Griffin, still quietly imperial, shooting alone from the corner. Then came Patty Mills, easy coiled energy, doing dribble-drive drills, spinning on his heels at the last step after laying it up and in, slipping back out past the line. James Harden, when he was still a Net, walking slow to the court with his big Beats headphones on, a contained universe, communicating beyond himself only by lifting his hands to a trainer in an ask for the next ball.
There’s always something sunny in Seth Curry but with the sleeveless warmup hoodie that he wears, hood up, he bounces around like a boxer and his intent is just as fixed. Andre Drummond, jostled and buffeted by the league’s trade winds, battening down against his own affable instincts. Bruce Brown briefly broke the wall the last time I watched these warm-ups, lifting his eyes to mine and giving a quick nod and smile, “How you doin’?” he said, before wrapping long tension bands around his biceps and getting to work on himself. Kyrie Irving I never saw in person this season because he wasn’t allowed to cross the border.
And Kevin Durant, well, there isn’t anyone more self-isolating in the NBA. Not brooding like Harden, not walled off by his own excess like Irving, not in a ready state of retreat like Ben Simmons, simply just always and forever a party of one. Shut your eyes and think of Durant as you’re reading this and I’ll bet you’ve pictured him alone.
The best, worst ways I tried to describe this phenomena was by calling Brooklyn a nightclub team, a fashion show team. Neither hit on the feeling I had dead-on but both offered the flash, individuality and inherent loneliness of this team. A team of individuals who never wanted to mix.
I say want and not figured out how to, because if you’re around the same people long enough, day in and out, you inevitably shed some of yourself on the other, you rub off. Aside from Mills, Brown, Nic Claxton in his probing inexperience (he’s supposed to be like that, it’s his third season) these guys drew their borders and walled up. Each their own country, beholden to the particulars of their own precise customs.
Wait, maybe this is the better picture.
West Side Story. The first, 1961 movie version.
You know ‘Jet Song’ because if you’ve heard it once it will tunnel up out of your memory without prompt every eight months to two years after the first time.
How it starts, that group of guys — I guess “gang” — watching Riff (Russ Tamblyn) with varying degrees of awe and remove as he tells them all the things they’ll have as a Jet. Constant connection, backup, a family. With every perk mentioned each person takes a step away until their backs are up against the brick walls of the back alley soundstage and Tamblyn vaults up to a handy horizontal gymnast bar to sit and sing solo. You see that this isn’t yet a group of guys all together, this is a collection of people ready to be convinced.
Later, when they trail Tamblyn and go careening into a roll-call, each guy calls out a claim of his own to what it’ll translate to, this being a Jet. The equivalence of gold medals and heavyweight titles in notoriety, a step up in rank no matter where you started from — boy becomes man, man becomes king.
By the end, by the time they all leave the schoolyard and spill into the street, well you aren’t scared because they’re stage-dressed as 1960s greasers in character, but you can believe they’ve gone from collection of guys to group, from Jet to Jets. All the ploy and big promises only anointing oil into sodality.
The Nets are still in the first seconds of this number. Only I’m not sure the franchise has got anyone balancing breezily up on that horizontal bar, singing the team’s praises to its new or even current recruits. Durant doesn’t want that kind of role, he only wants to clock in and do the thing he’s the greatest at and really, it’s why he went there in the first place. Irving, while he’s flirted with the concept of leader in abstract, doesn’t want it either. And even before Harden left — the front office forfeiting an intact version of a developing future in giving up Jarrett Allen and Caris LeVert — there’d been no proof that when you’re a Net, you stay a Net.
Steve Nash, as far as he is from smirking ringleader, knows what it is to run a functional, cohesive club. He helped to create it in Golden State over five seasons. This would’ve been a stage-production-sized wallop of a first assignment for any coach, and Nash has that as a buffer, but it was in the actual basketball where he floundered. Looked to the talent around him as individual instruments — pure shooters, no harmony — instead of melding for score.
The Nets don’t sound, or look, or feel like anyone other than themselves, and that’s their biggest problem.
I never would of made that connection, but it grew on me. What does a team give up in identity and character when it moves out some very solid role players for a star? James Harden has left a wake of destruction in his moves of the last few years to his own teams more than his opponents. How does Ben Simmons fill the role of scrappy to skilled players with all that baggage that will be inflated for the rest of his career. How does a huge Steve Nash fan reconcile Steve "I don't shit on the floor from anybody" Nash the player with the company man who had to walk out with a neutral to happy face about his team? I'm looking forward to the next article already.
To paraphrase Paul Simon, the Nets are a loose affiliation of millionaires, and only slightly less ringers/mercenaries than the Lakers. The Nets are that team in pickup games where guys already playing hedge their bets by getting the guy who's got next to pick them if they lose. Kenny Atkinson's Brooklyn Nets used to be that group of guys that rolled up to the court with five guys on three bikes that always played together. But the NBA is a superstar league, the owners don't have the patience for organically grown cohesive teams. Most players today were raised on AAU ball, one-and-done college squads of all the hot Boyz on one dope squad.
KD used to be one of the fellas until OKC fans turned on him for one playoff failure. Even though it was temporary, Durant held that grudge like a Sicilian and never got close again. Kyrie is interested in Kyrie; his audacious skills are to be used for Kyrie. Harden wouldn't settle for third banana on OKC, he was never going to do it in Brooklyn without the possibility of an immediate championship. The Nets we're ripe for a sweep by Boston, Milwaukee or Miami. Teams that rode to the court on each other's handlebars.