NEW YORK — Even before the Nets’ first superstar got injured and their second superstar forced a trade, home games in Barclays Center were a civic embarrassment. Rowdy local teenagers rained M-V-P chants on Steph Curry in November; a half-full arena worshipped LeBron James’ every move when the Lakers visited in January. As a resident of one of the neighborhoods surrounding the Barclays Center, I can attest that, in an area largely bereft of conspicuous basketball fandom, whatever faint NBA team spirit does exist around these parts comes in the form of Julius Randle or LeBron jerseys.
And it only got worse from there.
Kevin Durant got hurt and James Harden forced his way out of town, and home games went from cringeworthy to noncompetitive disgrace. The Raptors cruised to a 36-point blowout at Barclays on Monday night, barely raising eyebrows because getting torched by the likes of Scottie Barnes is a regular occurrence in Brooklyn now. The loss dropped the Nets to 13-17 at home. Without the unvaccinated Kyrie Irving to shoulder any of the load, they’ve won a single home game in the last six weeks.
As a title contender collapses, everyone has strapped on the hot dog suit as they scour the the barren Earth for the culprit.
Mayor Eric Adams says it’s his predecessor’s fault that Irving can’t play at home. He’s implied that Bill de Blasio’s Boston roots led him to create the tortured vaccine mandates that allow unvaccinated players from visiting teams but not New York ones. “I think the rule is unfair,” Adams said last month. “We are saying to out-of-town athletes that they can come in and not be vaccinated, yet New York athletes, you have to be vaccinated ... I’m not sure if a Boston fan created this rule, I don’t know.”
The degree to which Adams is joking becomes less clear as he keeps bringing it up, harping on it on the same day that he announced his pending repeal of the rule in question.
“Makes no sense, and I don’t know who thought about putting such a ridiculous rule in place,” he said, “of away teams can come and play when our teams from New York (can’t), but these are the rules, and I have to — I have to follow the rules.”
But the Key2NYC is gone as of next week, and Adams doesn’t have to follow the rules; he makes them. And anyway, there are perhaps a small handful of unvaccinated NBA players remaining, and none of them are remotely as consequential to their teams as Irving. In reality, there is no competitive advantage for road teams able to bring in unvaccinated players, unless you’re really jealous that the other team gets to use Justin Holiday while Irving sits.
The other Nets players say they can carry the load without Irving and passive-aggressively blame Harden, blaming his toxic disinterest for the team’s losing ways. After winning their first home game with Seth Curry and Andre Drummond, who came north in the Harden trade, the players Irving has hung out to dry threw an ostentatious celebration for the media’s benefit, then proclaimed everything was better. “The locker room is just a great vibe in there right now,” Bruce Brown said after the Feb. 14 win over the Kings at Barclays. “I don’t know what it is. Everything just shifted after the trade deadline. Everybody likes everybody, it’s just great.” That was the first home win for the Nets in a month; it would be their last for at least three weeks, as they haven’t won in Brooklyn since.
Harden has looked tremendous as a 76er since pouting his way out of Brooklyn, and he’s been mocked for the hamstring “tightness and strength deficit” that appeared miraculously healed once he was paired with Joel Embiid. But this was no normal NBA divorce. Irving explicitly told the world that whatever value he sees in remaining unvaccinated was more important than winning a ring with Harden.
“I’m not bringing science into basketball,” he said in his latest testy exchange with a reporter about the issue. “I’m just saying to everybody: I’m human, I have decisions to make. I have a family to take care of. There are things that are just as important to me as being great at the game of basketball or leaving a legacy.”
Fine, but who can blame Harden for not wanting Irving’s other priorities to get in the way of his title chase, especially when those priorities are complete nonsense?
Irving himself is the king of the blame game, muddling the situation more than anyone else has. He’s blamed the league and players union for giving him false assurances that they could find a loophole for his unprickable skin.
“The NBA and the NBPA made it very clear that there would be things that I would be able to do to work around this,” he said last month. “And that’s off the table.”
He called an ESPN reporter a “puppeteer” for having the audacity to ask if injuries to Durant and Harden increased his urgency to get vaccinated. And he blamed Adams and de Blasio. “I’m the only player that has to deal with this in New York City because I play there. We have Eric Adams, we have the New York mandate, we have things going on that are real-life circumstances that are not just affecting me, bro.”
No. Irving is the only player that has to deal with this because he’s the only player in New York who won’t get vaccinated. Amid the finger-pointing festival in Brooklyn, it’s not more complicated than that. The desperate search for the perfect person to blame or the perfect loophole for Irving have obscured his agency here. The Nets are a disaster because Irving is only partially available, and Irving is only partially available because he refuses to take a vaccine. This started with one man’s decision to refuse a shot, and it could end in the time it takes a needle to enter an arm.
