No sleep in Brooklyn
As previously mentioned, the Nets’ 2019-20 campaign has been, shall we say, turbulent at times and certainly inconsistent.
After an offseason in which they accelerated their rebuild and came out as winners by adding both Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving to top off their roster, the Nets have come to see that their return to relevancy hasn’t come with the leap they were envisioning when bringing on both stars last summer.
Of course, Durant’s absence has limited the ceiling of what this year’s Nets team can achieve. Yet Brooklyn has had trouble trying to bring together their holdover pieces with Irving and the long list of additions they made over the offseason such as DeAndre Jordan, Taurean Prince and Garrett Temple, among others.
Out of the 16 teams that are currently slotted in as playoff teams across both conferences, only the surging, upstart Memphis Grizzlies, coached by former Bucks assistant coach Taylor Jenkins, have a worse net rating than the Nets at this stage, per NBA.com/stats.
These issues and plenty of other concerns were always going to be hurdles the Nets had to overcome, with Durant on or off the floor. And that certainly rings true with their perennially restless star guard, Kyrie Irving, ruffling some feathers in the only way he knows how.