Blame For The Brooklyn Nets-Kevin Durant Trade Saga Falss Squarely On One Guy

It was just before 3 p.m. on a harmless Thursday afternoon, with the busiest period for NBA transactions set to begin just three hours later. That’s when it was reported by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski that, as he wrote on Twitter, “Brooklyn GM Sean Marks is working with Kevin Durant and his business manager Rich Kleiman on finding a trade for the franchise star.” Durant had decided to inform the Nets that afternoon that he’d like to be traded.

There was a scramble among teams around the league to tally the assets on their rosters in an effort to pull in Durant from the Nets. This is, after all, one of the three best players in the NBA, a player who averaged 29.9 points, 7.4 rebounds and 6.4 assists last season, while shooting 51.8% from the field. He was pegged as the 12^th-greatest player in NBA history by ESPN earlier this year, just ahead of Hakeem Olajuwon and Julius Erving. He’s pretty good.

And yet, in the end, the Nets found none of the offers they got for Durant acceptable. Phoenix? The Suns could not offer DeAndre Ayton because of his restricted free agency, and they would not offer Devin Booker. So it was a package built around Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson and draft picks. Miami? The Heat short on picks and will not send out Bam Adebayo, leaving their offer at Tyler Herro, Kyle Lowry and some pocket change. Toronto? No Scottie Barnes, no deal.

We know about the Boston-Jaylen Brown discussions. It’s little wonder the Nets leaked those—it’s the only reasonable talk they’ve had with another team about a Durant trade, one in which they got anything close to the value they’re expecting.

No Durant Deal? Blame Durant

It’s been a frustrating month for Durant. Nobody wants him, at least not badly enough. He’s an all-time great who is somehow not worth Booker or Brown or Adebayo or even Barnes. But before you shed a tear for Durant, remember where the fault for this mess lies: with Durant himself.

“I have not heard that enough in all of this,” one NBA front-office executive said. “I have seen Kyrie Irving get blamed, I have seen Sean Marks get blamed, Covid get blamed, Steve Nash, Joe Tsai, everyone involved in any of this has been taking the blame. But I have not seen Kevin Durant get the blame and that is where it should go. Who drops a trade request a week after the draft? Who drops it a couple hours before the start of free agency? That’s crazy.”

Indeed, by the time Durant’s trade request reverberated around the league, most NBA owners were not so much salivating over the prospect of landing Durant as they were outraged by the prospect of another superstar signed to a very generous long-term deal agitating for a trade, after a year in which Ben Simmons of the Sixers and James Harden of those same Nets had done just that. The focus of the league’s decision-makers has not so much been on how to get Durant but on how to prevent this trend spreading in the future.

That’s a leaguewide issue. But in the case of Durant and the Nets, the issue was not just the trade demand, but the timing of the trade demand. If he’d done it a month earlier, the Nets would have been in a much better place—teams like Miami and Phoenix could have made roster-altering trades to put themselves in position to satisfy the Nets’ demand for an All-Star caliber player, a rotation player and a raft of draft picks in exchange for Durant. That didn’t happen.

Instead, Durant torpedoed his own market by waiting until crunch time to decide to let the league know he was unhappy and wanted out.

“It’s impossible to get traded that way if you’re a guy like Durant,” the executive said. “There are so many moving parts involved when you want to make a trade like that but you just don’t have the parts to move if you wait until July to start moving them. You can’t do it.”

The Nets have found just that. No one has the parts to move. Durant has found it, too, as he remains in Brooklyn less than two months before the start of training camp and is going to have to get used to the idea that he’s not leaving the Nets this season. But if he’s looking for someone to blame for that, he does not have to look far.