This was completely different. This one was distinctive. For the primary time, actually, these Nets have been pressured to make an announcement: about themselves, about their season, about the place they intend to take the steadiness of this season. For the primary time, actually, these Nets, have been ordered to declare themselves.
It may need been unattainable to imagine again in October that such a stand could be required earlier than Might Day, or that it might occur in opposition to a Charlotte Hornets workforce that was scuffling and one recreation below .500. However, then: the Nets have been scuffling and one recreation below .500. They don’t imagine their file, which is ok, so long as they may make one thing of a counterargument.
Which they did. At ear-splitting quantity.
“That,” Steve Nash would say, “was about in addition to we’ve performed all yr, each side of the ball.”
He was referring to the primary half of Tuesday’s 132-121 taming of the Hornets at Charlotte’s Spectrum Middle, and he was proper. The Nets squashed the Hornets all throughout these first 24 minutes, rolling to a 69-43 lead. That cushion would develop as massive as 34 earlier than the Hornets began making a couple of photographs, however by then the message was already despatched.
The Nets actually might be frighteningly good typically.
“It felt like this was my night time, attending to that deep place the place you’re not distracted by something,” Kyrie Irving mentioned. “That look on my face was that we’re able to go on the market and do what’s wanted to get this win. And the outcomes are the outcomes.”
Irving’s voice was the loudest, and the clearest. He turned in one of many signature performances of his life, dropping 50 factors (on simply 19 photographs) capturing 9-for-12 from 3, including six assists. That it got here on an evening when Kevin Durant was uncharacteristically sluggish and scored solely 14 factors (although he had seven assists) was maybe essentially the most helpful half.
As a result of with all of the drama that has consumed the Nets prior to now few weeks — centered across the James Harden/Ben Simmons sagas — and with all that has occurred to the Nets, and the world, since July of 2019, it has been simple to neglect one thing.
These Nets’ emergence as a title contender was initially — and, it was thought on the time, fully — tied to Irving and Durant. Earlier than there was ever speak of a Large 3 there was the truth of the Large 2, Durant and Irving agreeing to go to Brooklyn collectively within the mid-to-late levels of their primes, teaming as much as see what they may do, the place they may go, how excessive they chilly elevate a franchise that’s title free for the reason that ABA closed up store 46 years in the past.
That, alone, had made the Nets an electrical story. When Harden arrived from Houston, it appeared merely an additional toy so as to add to the chest. Harden, in any case, was becoming a member of a work-in-progress that Irving and Durant had already begun to construct. And now that he’s switched locations with him, that’s the position Simmons will fill, no matter how prepared he's to play when he does return to the court docket.
The nucleus was at all times KD and Kyrie.
That was at all times the ability supply.
Durant was good Sunday in Boston, when the Nets almost stole one from the Celtics. On Tuesday, it was Irving’s flip.
“We confirmed,” Nash mentioned, “the extent we will play at.”
Sure, the Nets’ ambitions are, and at all times have been, higher than a Tuesday night time in March in North Carolina. However the Nets’ actuality is one thing else: they need to be ready to put a damage on all of the groups with whom they’re presently battling for the play-in video games. The Cavaliers — simply above the play-in cutline — received once more, so that they remained six video games up within the loss column with 16 Nets video games left. There's nonetheless loads of heavy lifting forward.
Tuesday was a reminder that this isn’t merely a workforce constructed on hype and hyperbole. When Irving and Durant play collectively, they'll make basketball look remarkably lovely, and so they could make even the steep mountain they’re going to need to climb, nonetheless, appear nearly manageable. The Large 3 didn’t fairly work out. However the Large 2 is likely to be all they actually need.
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