Kevin Durant opens up on Nets trade request: There was ‘no consistency, no continuity’
Roughly a year-and-a-half ago, Kevin Durant broke the basketball world by requesting a trade from the Brooklyn Nets, an organization he joined ahead of the 2019-20 season to team up with Kyrie Irving in hopes of winning an NBA Title.
Durant’s request, which was originally geared toward the Phoenix Suns and the Miami Heat being the top two teams on his list, was eventually rescinded later that summer. Though the night ahead of the 2023 NBA Trade Deadline, Durant was shipped to the Suns along with TJ Warren in exchange for Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, Jae Crowder four first-round picks and a 2028 pick swap.
Durant, who effectively only played roughly two-and-a-half seasons with Brooklyn–missing the 2019-20 season recovering from a torn Achilles suffered in the 2018-19 NBA Finals–recently opened up to reporters on why he requested a trade from the organization last summer.
“Yeah, it just wasn’t no consistency, no continuity on who we were as a team,” Durant said, according to Brian Lewis of The New York Post. “And when you want to win a championship, you’ve got to build an identity from Day 1, and it was just a lot of circumstances that were out of the players’ control that got in the way of us building our continuity. That’s just the business of basketball. That’s just the NBA in general.
“I tried, but time ran out. I wasn’t going to miss no games because of this whole thing. So once the season rolled around, I was just like, whatever happens, it happens, and I just get ready for the season. So it worked out perfect timing, the way it’s supposed to.”
Ahead of the 2021 trade deadline, the Nets traded for superstar guard James Harden, but the Harden-Durant-Irving triumvirate played only 16 games–365 minutes–together; they ultimately only won one postseason series together (against the Boston Celtics) and were one foot away–literally–from winning a second in the Eastern Conference Semifinals against the Milwaukee Bucks.
Harden was eventually flipped to the Philadelphia 76ers–which ended unceremoniously–while Irving was sent to the Dallas Mavericks mere days before Durant was traded.
“We all got better as individual players, and we learned a lot from that experience,” Durant said. “Everybody from executives to players — and we can go about our NBA experience with more knowledge now.”
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