NEW YORK — Kyrie Irving made his home debut Sunday night, in the 75th game of a Nets season in which he was not seriously injured, nor recovering from surgery, nor trapped in some alternate plane of existence.
There is nothing normal about that sentence, nothing normal about the circumstances that led here and nothing normal about the challenge this purported contender now faces—primarily because of the predicament Kyrie Irving put the Nets in with his stubborn, bewildering refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Those facts did not change Sunday, no matter how many warm, roaring ovations Irving received in his first home game since New York amended its vaccine mandate. And the celebratory mood at Barclays Center grew dour by the end of the night, as the Nets fell to the Hornets, 119–110, leaving the two teams tied for eighth place in the East.
