SI’s Chris Mannix and Howard Beck discuss Monday’s bombshell that Kevin Durant gave the Nets an ultimatum and what the request means for both Durant and Brooklyn’s future.
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Chris Mannix: On Monday, the basketball gods giveth once again. According to The Athletic, Kevin Durant had a meeting with Nets owner, Joe Tsai. And in that meeting, Durant told Tsai that he needed to choose between Durant and the pairing of general manager Sean Marks and head coach Steve Nash, effectively telling Tsai: It's me or it's them.
Your reaction to KD’s, uh, pretty explosive meeting—which by the way, I wanna point out, first of all, Kevin Durant, who's on social media all day long, has not denied this. Nobody from Durant's camp has denied this. In fact, the only comment about this came from Joe Tsai, who came out and tweeted that he will do what's in the best interest of the Nets, and the coach and the GM have his full support.
So you have the floor, Howard, what did you think?
Howard Beck: Oh, man.
Let me just back up for a second. You mentioned that Kevin Durant hasn't tweeted any denial, nor did he tweet any denial of his initial trade demand back on June 30 I think it was. Nor has he weighed in on any platform. Players today have every platform in the world at their disposal and, in Kevin Durant's case, an entire media company that he and his business partner, Rich Kleiman, run. They have chosen not to avail themselves of any of that to clarify, to inform, to deny, to confirm, to anything.
There's plenty of room here and there's been plenty of time for them to confirm, clarify, deny, whatever they need to do. They haven't. So we will take it all at face value.
Given all of that, Chris, given what we've known for weeks, given that we've known that Kevin Durant has wanted out, has not denied that. If his goal was to remove the entire leadership, the GM and the coach, and have them replaced, and that was the key to him staying, well, then that's a card you should have played maybe in June when you first delivered the trade demand, or maybe in April when they flamed out in a sweep by Boston in the first round. If these are your concerns, if you do not still have the faith that you had only a year ago when you signed the four-year extension that is about to begin, if these concerns are now that prominent, that urgent, then the second the season was over, you should have been in there with Joe Tsai saying, Listen, I've lost faith in this whole operation. So either move me or change up your leadership. And you have that discussion in April, May, June, even July maybe. Not August. You're too close to the coming season. Teams, at least functioning teams, do not make dramatic changes in leadership at this late stage. … I don't even know who you would get in either of those roles if you did it.
It feels to me like desperation. This feels to me like, I made my trade demand. You did your best, presumably, to try to meet my trade demand. You didn't get anything you wanted. You haven't traded me. I'm still here. I don't want to be here. We're starting to get close to September and I'm getting a little antsy. I gotta play another card. So now he plays the it's-me-or-them card. That's what it feels like to me. My read is this is a desperation play because we're this deep in the summer and he hasn't been moved yet.
We still don't really know—and, by the way, I'm not sure the Nets truly know—what is driving this for Kevin Durant. Is it the way that they've dealt with Kyrie and the whole vaccination saga and his contract extension saga? Is it about moves that they have made with the roster? Moves they have not made with the roster? By the way … the roster as it stands right now could win the championship. If Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving had Ben Simmons are all on board and healthy, with a healthy Joe Harris and a healthy Seth Curry—two of the best shooters in the league—with Patty Mills, with Nic Claxton, with Royce O'Neale, who they picked up, and perhaps a healthy TJ Warren, who's obviously a great upside play there, this team could win a championship. It's not even a crazy notion. On paper, they've got the talent and the depth.
So what is it exactly that Kevin Durant is still so concerned about? And where does he think he's going to land in a trade, after some team has given up a boatload for him, that's gonna have a better chance to win than what he has in Brooklyn? None of this makes any more sense today than it did when the trade demand first landed. In fact, it makes even less sense because now he's playing cards that if you were going to play them should have been played months ago.
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Mannix: Yeah, to me, this crystallizes a few things. No. 1, you know, if this is accurate, Kevin Durant's issue at the moment is not with Kyrie Irving. That's what was speculated about, wondered about. Was his relationship with Irving strained at the moment? Doesn't seem like—at least if this report is to be believed—that that is the case.
Now, I can see why Durant is disenchanted with Steve Nash. I've been a vocal critic of Nash. I just don't think he's a high-level coach. I thought it was a mistake to hire him two years ago. I thought they were thinking too outside the box then in bringing in a guy who had a relationship with Durant, who had a relationship with Sean Marks, but had absolutely no coaching experience at least when it came to coaching on the bench.
So I can see Durant being disenchanted after two years, well, really one year of Nash. And that year culminating with Steve Nash being coached circles around by Ime Udoka. This isn't Monday morning quarterbacking here. I said this months ago. I just don't think Steve Nash is a very good coach. And I think Kevin Durant over the course of this year kinda realized that.
Now the Sean Marks stuff is a little bit trickier to figure out. Is he upset about the way Sean Marks handled the Irving situation? Is he upset that Sean Marks made the Harden deal to begin with? You know, they gave up key assets in Caris LeVert and Jarett Allen and other role players that would've been pretty valuable to this team. Is he upset about how the Harden negotiations came down afterwards when they traded Harden to Philadelphia? That's a little bit more difficult to figure out.
What I do know, Howard, is that Kevin Durant has pushed this situation to the point of no return. If there was any thought prior to Monday about Kevin Durant coming to training camp, being a part of this Nets team this year, he can't do it now. You can’t say—and this report is the equivalent of Kevin Durant saying it because Durant has declined to deny it—you can't say that you don't believe in your front office and more specifically your coach, and then hope to have any success with that team during the season. I don't see it happening.
To me, Howard, this broke Brooklyn. This ended any chance of the band getting back together for next year.
Beck: I'm not so sure. Let me start with this. The idea that he's pushed us to the point of no return, that was the point of the exercise, right? Again, this was a power play. It was a belated power play. And again, if your true goal was to remove the leadership, that's something you should have said months ago. You don't all of a sudden wake up in August and say, You know what? I'm not sure Sean Marks and Steve Nash are the right guys for this. Like, why is that something you're telling them in August? Now, maybe that's something that he had hinted at or even said before, and maybe it just hadn't been reported yet. Sometimes there is a lag between when conversations happen and when we learn about them—and I'm not saying that The Athletic, that Shams Charania didn't get this right or the timing right. It may well be that this was all said this weekend when they met, but it may also well be that it was said in a different way a couple months ago for all we know.
But if this is as it appears and he is just now playing these cards, then it looks more to me like he's just reaching for anything that will force the issue, that will force their hand, that will force them to make a trade that they don't wanna make just for the sake of resolving this. Because he wants them to believe—as you seem to, Chris—that this means they're beyond the point of no return.
I'm skeptical about points of no return because …
Mannix: Really, why?
Beck: Because I've seen too many times Kobe Bryant having a meltdown and saying I'm never playing for the Lakers again and I wanna be traded. And then he ends up winning a championship the next year with them and taking them to three more Finals.
I've seen Phil Jackson say that Kobe Bryant is uncoachable and people thinking that they could never get back together and then they get back together. I hate to rely on the Lakers of the Shaq-Kobe era for all of my most resonant examples. But this league is funny this way. … Stuff happens all the time. We think that things are beyond a point of no return and stuff settles down.
If Kevin Durant doesn’t get traded … the reality of it is this: It's not like the Nets haven't tried. You could say maybe they haven't tried hard enough, or you could say, hey, they should just settle for whatever. But now we're back to the whole Ben Simmons-Daryl Morey standoff, too. You could say that they could have made a deal by now. Maybe they could have, probably at a terrible loss. I think everybody would agree the Nets should make the deal that makes the most sense for the Nets, and Joe Tsai’s tweet kind of underscored, again, they're gonna do what's in the Nets’ best interest. The Nets’ best interest is keeping Kevin Durant and keeping Kevin Durant happy. But … I also don't think you sacrifice your entire organization at the altar of your star. You've already given so much to Durant and Kyrie Irving in the couple years they've been in Brooklyn that you could argue that was part of the problem in the first place. But that's not a healthy way of running an organization, right? That is not sending the right message overall about how the convictions and the principles that you've built your organization on. So you can't do that.
But if you decide not to trade him, or if you decide we have not gotten the right deal, and training camp arrives, the pressure moves to Kevin Durant. He's the one who has to decide, at age 34, which he'll turn in September, that he's gonna start burning days, weeks and maybe months of his career—a career that is probably closer to its twilight than not. And again, three years removed from an Achilles' injury. He already just had a season torched by his buddy, Kyrie Irving, a chance at a championship torched. How much more time does he have to waste? The burden shifts to him if he's not traded.
