Come on, you're listening to heat Check from Tristan crick Odyssey's official NBA podcast. Find that wherever you get your podcasts and live all throughout free agency, Summer League, and beyond. If you can't get passed a live forth without huge moves, huge signings going on, I need them. I need them like air, and I need them yesterday. That's all that's
all there that I need to say about that. So let's move over forward to the Kevin Durant saga, because we have to talk about it, even though it's everywhere. It's pretty surreal to think that Kevin Durant has finally asked to be traded officially, that he said, Hey, I'm sorry, guys, this thing's not working out. Is this the most monumental trade in NBA history? Trade request in NBA history? This would be like if Kobe Bryant asked out publicly, because we know we tried to leave LA, but nobody knew
until after the fact. Right. It's bigger than Harden, It's bigger than Paul George, It's bigger than Kawhi. To me, the only thing on that level would be if you're honest or Steph asked out right now, and that would be absolutely insane. And what's nuts is that the people in Brooklyn and fans of the Nets just don't seem to care whatsoever. It's like they're so scarred of bad things happening to them that it's just like another Tuesday. It's just really like nothing is going on. You glipped.
It's like you blink your eye. You have three All Stars and the top fifteen players of our current day, and now you have zero zero them, and then you've got Ben Simmons and you're hopefully going to get some picks back that makes sense for you. For Kevin Durant.
I mean, this is so unprecedented. It literally hijacked all a free agency to the point where I think moves aren't even being made for DeAndre Ayton because we know that they're attached or connected to Kevin Durant, right, And what should have been a discussion about like Bradley Beal or Levine or Ayton turned into just chaos, mass chaos. Wendy reported that over half the NBA has been looking to get Kevin Durant, and that was before free agency
actually began. We discussed this as a possibility about two weeks ago, and rather than give you lots of speculation, I think I'm gonna do something that we haven't seen yet. Outline really quickly how we got here, going back to twenty thirteen, really when all of this began. What began you might ask the same thing that's happening right now, the demise and crumbling of the Nets franchise as we know it. And it's not that very long after they
made that, the same disastrous trade that they do it again. Right. It was KG, it was Paul Pierce, it was Williams, it was Brook Lopez, it was Joe Johnson. And if you look back onto how that went down, it's pretty informative because history happens once as a tragedy and twice as farce. Because the second Big three of Kyrie Katie Harden is connected actually the first big three in my opinion, of KG, Pierce and Williams. So okay, so set your
time machine back to twenty thirteen. Bron the first attempt by this franchise to build a big three. They wanted to counter the heat. Stupid, stupid. You should have known that Lebron James would go somewhere else, because that's what he does, he runs from the grind switches teams. So Nett receive Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, DJ White, Jason Terry. Celtics received scrubs and a bunch of picks twenty fourteen, twenty sixteen, writes to swap twenty seventeen, and twenty eighteen.
In twenty sixteen, that pick becomes Jalen Brown. In twenty seventeen, that pick becomes Jason Tatum. In twenty eighteen, the Celtics had the number eight pick in the draft. That pick gets rerouted to Cleveland as a part of the trade, that becomes Kyrie Irving. I cannot articulate to you how bad that trade was for the Nets, and how bad
this trade is for the Nets. What looked like, well the hardened trade mostly what looked like it was going to be Kyrie and Katie and a bunch of young players right with a great culture turn into no players besides what they get for Kevin Durant, no draft picks besides what they get for KD, and a whole lot of chaos. Everyone wants to give their take on who to blame. Is it Kevin, is it Kai? Is it Hardened?
Is it all three of them, and to me, I think you got to look back to how this all began, which is the mentality of getting superstars to win titles. If you look at it as a family, I think Josai is essentially the father. He's made his billions because of Ali Baba, a Chinese company, the Chinese Amazon and Jack ma currently who started Ali Baba, has a net worth of nine billion. Josi. He bought the nets from
a Russian oligarch named Mikhail Prokrooff in twenty nineteen. You probably remember proker Off because he was the one who did the Josi thing and crashed the nets the first time around. And he did this by not only throwing out huge contracts, but by making sure those star players get taken care of in every way possible. That's what Josai decided he wanted to do, is to make a very concerted effort into turning the franchise into a funhouse of NBA teams to attract star players don't want to
be there. Cyan Heritage Sean Marks as GM. Sean Marks was hired in twenty sixteen and told pro Kraft he was an idiot. Yo, you're an idiot. For trying to do this win now thing. He saw the franchise implode and hit just twenty one wins, and he said, I was clear in our meeting that if you're looking for a quick fixed guy like you did before, that I'm not the guy for you. Hired Kenny Atkinson. Sean Marks. He had this slow, methodical mentality about how to build
a team. The Nets became a succeed. They had Jared Allen, they had Spencer Dinwiddie, they had Joe Harris, they had Caris LeVert. He turned Joe Harris into something Torrian Prince D'Angelo Russell. This team was an absolute blast to watch. And then when Joe Side bought the team from broker Off, win Now baby was back on the table. So where do you think this mandate came from? Given the fact that Sean Marks told proker Off, I'm not all about
win now for sure. Joe Side right, and from the beginning it was like, let's go out and get big free agents. Kyrie KD came in twenty nineteen, even though Durant was out the full year. He gets his full salary. Kyrie played twenty games and then went to the bubble and was like, Yeah, I can't play in the bubble. Let's start our own league. Let's not even go to the bubble. Kyrie had Atkinson and kd had Atkinson. They pushed him out the door because they didn't want to
run wind sprints right. Just four days before coronavirus, four days before Adam Silver shut down the league. They fired Atkinson four days Coach David Fizdale said this about the firing. When it comes to players with power, your front office has to be really strong. Your culture has to be strong to whether disgruntled players tell them kids to fuck off, settle down. Their little hot heads can go sit in a corner somewhere. We're staying with Kenny Atkinson. He got
us to that place. He also says this, you have to be a certain amount of support for your coach when things get turbulent. They wanted to appease those star players, so they allowed Kenny Atkinson to go out the door, and then to choose the coach. They chose their teacher in Steve Nash. Star players didn't want a hard, driving, developmentally focused coach when things weren't smooth from day one, How could they be smooth? Rock Kevin Durant out a
full year, KD played twenty games a pandemic kit. What are we talking about? No gelling time? As as Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving said, we just didn't have enough time to gel Give us some time. By the way, fast forward, Papa Joe decides to do the same thing Prokaroff had done in twenty thirteen as an aside, Like I said, Prokarov said, the Paul Pierce Kevin Garnett deal was one of the biggest business regrets he's ever had
in his whole life. Pro Karoff a Russian oligarch. When he says a trade is so bad that it's one of the biggest things that haunts him at night. A Russian billionaire, that's his biggest regret. Do you know what type of moves you need and deals you need to make in order to become a billionaire in Russia? As my mom would say, slit their mother's throat for a loaf of bread? Do you know what you need to
do to be a billionaire? That's the thing he regrets most, not all of the things that you need to do in order to acquire the billions in Russia. Nope, those five first round picks or whatever it was that they had to give to the Boston Celtics. It was that. But this is not as bad as the move that Joe Side demanded. So he lets the kids choose the teacher, a guy who is great, a guy who's a two time MVP, never coached a fucking second in his life,
not once. They went from the strongest player development coach in the league to a guy who's never developed anything outside of a soccer ball, a guy who could be commentating in Edmonton Oilers game tomorrow. No shape, that's facts. How much respect did Steve Nash get when he entered the league? None? Zero. Immediately, Kyrie Irving told the world I could be coached. I could be coached one day, KD could be coach. We all pretty much coaches like
we're all players, former players. Who cares d'An Toni's here. He lets us run everything we want. It's all good. Turns out it wasn't all good. Maybe you don't need a coach for a seven time All Star, but a guy right out of the sec in Cam Johnson, Cam Smith, Cam Smith get all the cams confused. He needs to be told what to do. And there's nobody there to
shepherd him. Guys like old Andre Drummonds of the world, the LaMarcus Audiers of the world, the Blake Griffins of the world, they need coaching to figure out their place in the ecosystem. If they didn't need coaches to figure out their place in the ecosystem, and they could consistently be good, they wouldn't be role players. They'd be stars.
Role players and veterans need coaching. If Gary Payton, let me ask you this, if Gary Payton is second could be and was who he turned out to with Kenny Atkinson and Golden State, he wouldn't have been sitting on any ten day contracts. He would have been Gary Payton Second, making ten million dollars a year as a role player in this league. Without that, he'd be still on his couch. In other words, the kids need rules. The kids need structure. We saw it when Russell Westbrook went to LA and
there was no rules. Disaster, chaos, And we know star players make terrible GMS. Case in point. Early on the twenty twenty season, James Harden Kevin Durant in the summer start plotting. Harden decides he wants out of Houston. Kevin Durant knows Harden from days in Okay, see as you know, and you might think hardens to blame too, but I actually think Carden was the first one to us out the things were bad in Brooklyn, like I need to get out of here. This is a dumpster fire, like
the Titanic is ready to go. So in our Brooklyn Nuts family analogy, do you think of James Harden's like the cousin who came to live there for the summer and thought maybe he'd stay for the school year and realized, like no, I got to go back home. And we know how the hard and trade went and how it all evolved, because we've talked about it a lot. But Kyrie went on walk about and Nash had zero explanation. He had not spoken to Kyrie. He didn't say there
was anything wrong with it. He was so afraid to talk smack about his star player that we all knew that Steve Nash had no idea what the right moves were. Kevin Durant was hurt in that season. He played only thirty five regular season games, which is exactly how many games Harden played. As well. Kyrie sprained his ankle, as we know, and they were one shoeprint away from going
to the Eastern Conference finals, probably the finals. And that was the amazing thing, right because the fact that Kevin Durant played fifty three minutes in that finals game is all you need to know about how Steve Nash manages his rotations, how close they came with those three at least somewhat in jail, a lot of quick fixes trying to get Harden a fix that turned out to not be so quick after all. Right, fast forward to this season.
Because Kyrie doesn't get the vaccination and the state mandates, and we don't really need to go into that, he only plays. Also, Kevin Durant signs the max deal thinking Kyrie Irving's gonna get it. He signed it thinking that same summer Kyrie and him were going to be lined up with that extensions and that Harden was going to be lined up with an extension. No, no, baby, no no. Kyrie's offer gets rescinded. Harden pushes it off and says, I need to wait to see if I'm gonna stay
for the school year. Summertime still here, folks, I need to just sit back and wait and I think Harden was the only one who saw what the fuck was happening, because multiple times that presser is Hardened saying to the world, I'm going to force Kyrie Irving to get vaccinated in myself. Kyrie Irving comes back halftime and hard and is like, this is fucking outrageous, Like I don't know what's going on. Andrew Wiggins, the Canadian, he's getting vaccinated. Why can't Kyrie,
I don't know what is going on. Get me out of here. I need my hookah, I need a new jersey, and I need to go up the street to Philadelphia. And that's the thing. You can't put all your eggs in one basket with no supporting cast. You can't hire an inexperienced coach and expect him not only to navigate egos, which he did, okay, but also coach a bug vevia young players and veteran minimum retreads, and then also be lying to the media simultaneous about all the crazy chaos
that was happening behind the scenes. So then they trade Harden for Ben Simmons, who's not played a game in I don't know twelve over twelve months now. Then, of course the next flame out in the first round. And now Jo sighs done with Kyrie? Why are you done
with Kyrie e? Right now? You did everything to put him in a place to enable him to think that he could be the GM, that he could be the coach, that he cannot play games, that he could sit out, that he can go on talk about he can wear no master his sister's birthday party and get suspended, all of these things that you gave him the power to do. And now you're like, he's fucking around with my money.
And after that, it's clear that things need to be changed and you need to put in some rules into place, and Kyrie Irving's not really wanting those rules to be in place. Daddy wants the kids now to have a curfew, can they now? Can you really blame them for saying, we haven't had a curfew this whole time? Fuck off, We'll come home when we want to come home. So
who's to blame everyone? But mostly Joe side, Mostly Joe side, because Kevin lobby to get rid of Kenny right, Kevin lobby to bring in Steve nash Right, he lobbied to trade the whole roster and a bunch of first round picks for an out of shape former superstar who you don't know if he can actually perform, and then when it goes south, he then lobbies to be traded. But you can say no every step of the way to
those things. You can say no to getting rid of Atkinson, you can say no to Nash, you can say no to trading for Harden, and you can still have this roster in place. But what we miss in this all is that Kevin can't actually make those decisions count. Kenny. That's it's like when a kid gets fat like a like you see childhood obesity. Do we blame the kid. No, it's the parents giving the kid the food. It's the people in place making sure that the kid is supposed
to get nutrition or not. You can't have cake before breakfast, Kevin. I'm sorry. No, you cannot, absolutely not. I don't care that you really want it. No, you cannot trade Jared Allen for first and for four first round picks for James Harden. I don't care that Kyrie Irving's on walk about. We did not need another point guard. We need a rim protector. No, we can't put on We can't put on DeAndre Jordan on our roster for ten million dollars a year. That's when I knew things were fucked up.
Right then, I was like, they get to bring their walk trend for ten million dollars a year? Wow, do they run the team? Sith? So to me, this soft falls on Joe Side. Kyrie's made bad decisions, Kd's made bad decisions. Sean Marks is the GM, but Joe Side's one of the most active decision makers in all of basketball ownership. And Joe said should take every single bit of blame. And you know what, Joe Sige's the one telling everyone who has season tickets, you're not getting any refunds.
Joe Side is the one who is saying, I have to keep some semblance of my money for this dog shit franchise that I ran into the ground. Then nobody even cares about in their own city. And at the end of the day, He's going to do whatever it takes to preserve the value of his franchise and keep the money flowing. And maybe that means not trading Kevin Durant at all, and maybe that means finally saying, fuck you,
where does this all go? Somehow, I think Kyrie makes his way to the Lakers, and somehow I think they still don't make the playoffs. And third, I think the Brooklyn Nets will be a lottery team for a very long time and they'll won't have their picks until the next two administrations. From now two administrations for now twenty twenty eight. Rock That's when I can hear Tillman Fertita, the Houston Rockets owner, laughing in Houston, all the way
from District of Columbia. And you know what, turns out the man with the shrimp forks pretty smart. They didn't want any He didn't didn't want any players. He just wanted all those picks and all those pick swaps. That's all the time that we have for the heat Check. We went back Tuesday with a new episode from Summer League in Vegas. Follow us for all the reviews of rookies that you can handle. I'm gonna be going to
every single game. I'm gonna be talking to all of the reporters and beat people and newsbreakers, GMS coaches, all of them. Do not forget to download, subscribe, Please tell your friends, every single one and follow us on social ad at this heat Check and Tristan correct on TikTok produces guys wish Me, a Safe Flight m