The Brooklyn Nets were tragically and dismayed on Monday night. Most were swept home with the crowd cheering for the Celtics. Was swept home after Kevin Durant missed a crucial free throw. Swamps home with the dismissal of Kyrie Irving by Marcus Smart. Like psychic dwarfs in this series shrunk and flowed at home.
The many symbols of disaster that loomed large for the Nets this season are explained in much greater detail in this column space. All of these are troubling to anyone who has a stake in the future of this franchise. But no one seems more unlucky than Ben Simmons’ absence.
He was nowhere to be seen on the nets bench, not even wearing his traditional DNP Elton John outfit to please his teammates. We were given a new reason why Simmons was not playing in Monday’s 116-112 loss, an absence that ensured he missed out on this entire season. Simmons is apparently dealing with a mental issue, or, as coach Steve Nash vaguely referred to, “there’s a mental component to everything.”
We knew there might be a problem with the location of his head after the fall of Simmons in Philadelphia. This is the basis for filing a complaint seeking the recovery of approximately $20 million in salaries from the Sixers. Ok OK. Except, three things: 1) GM Sean Marks should have considered the issue, along with Simmons’ tendency to back pain, before he could have three years left on the maximum contract for a player, 2) a Why should there be hope, after a full year of being unable to play through this “mental component” Simmons will ever return to the court, let alone at the same All-Star level as a few seasons ago, and 3) Nets and Steve Nash are not reliable. He’s lost all credibility this season, and that doesn’t mean Simmons should be insensitive to whatever he’s doing. This is to call upon the nets to expose their lies and misleads.
Take what they say with a grain of salt. This includes the aftermath of Monday night’s loss, when Nash claimed that a team with title aspirations did a fair job given the off-court play. Nash’s bar was clearly lowered to the floor.
“When you add that up, it’s hard to say we underperformed,” Nash said.
Remember when Nash claimed that everything was great with James Harden and he wasn’t going to do business? About a week later, Harden was traded. Remember when Sean Marks and Joe Tsai got on their high horses and announced that Kyrie Irving would not be accepted as a part-time player? You know the rest.
Irving’s decision to skip the vaccine was always going to be judged by how the team fared in the playoffs, and Monday was used as a reason for it to be swapped.
“It’s been really heavy emotionally this season. We all felt it,” Irving said. “I felt like I was really letting the team down when I couldn’t play. It became a distraction. ,
Nash has come under heavy scrutiny, and rightly so, based on his groundbreaking playoff series. But the problems run deeper than the coach.
GM Sean Marks did a good job building the foundation of a young team, riding on Kenny Atkinson’s wave of player development several years ago. And after Irving and Durant hatched a plot to sign with Brooklyn in 2019, Marx still had solid young players and a future first round pick to knock out a champion.
Except Marx confused it.
The supporting cast around Durant and Irving is somehow worse than it was three years ago. Most of it is about the Simmons disaster, or the James Harden disaster – depending on how you want to blame.
Either way, the result was a first-round sweep, a year wasted and a missing Ben Simmons.
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