Exits: Brooklyn, before and after

The Nets were two separate teams this season, and we never got a chance to believe in the 2nd.

I gotta step on it. I know.

But I keep thinking about how weird it must have been for the Nets — when I say ‘Nets’ I mean James Harden, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving — to see the rolling juggernaut of these playoffs pass them by, move on completely to hoist up a team out of the East they were all but assured to make light work of, a team out of the West they could smother with collective experience even if their legs couldn’t keep up.

This was their stage, right? And here they are, watching from way in the back, faces cool instead of flush with the heat of all those brights lights on them.

Only, they aren’t watching at all.

Harden’s in Paris, floating through the clustered and haughty marble buildings of its circuitous arrondissements, unreadable behind his glossy white Kurt Cobain frames. Irving, happily removed from the media swarm of the playoffs, is probably holding his newborn to his chest in a steamy room awash in eucalyptus and soft light, that or changing a diaper, nothing as urgent as the focus of finishing. Durant — well if any one out of that trifecta is watching then it’s probably him. But watching like how I’ve been catching myself doing it, lying down on the couch or in bed, eyes darting up over the top of my phone at the laptop or TV screen with the game on between glances at the timeline, scrolling, two places at once but corporeally checked out, maybe not really anywhere.

It’s easier to talk about the Nets this way, the idea of the Nets this way, because what they were supposed to be never really took shape this season. The three of them, and the team behind that, didn’t merge, each of their outlines stayed too distinct. Plus it seemed a rule of basketball elements (plus Covid and injuries) that the three of them could not be in the same place for too long, so we had Harden and Durant, with Irving quietly watching from his folding chair on the side, or we got Irving and Harden, Durant put in and yanked, then put in and yanked again, there was Harden alone, Durant alone, Irving alone, but all the while they wobbled around each other like satellites, or like oppositely charged particles pining for the other, or coolly repelling, depending on the day.

So we think about the Nets, because they still exist in our heads more than anywhere else.

We think about the promise of them, which at this point is furloughed, out for the summer. We think about the little flashes we saw, an arms-length, imperious Harden still skulking way out at half court because old habits are hard to shake, a revved up Irving with sly handles made for ditching guys he promised to meet at a pre-determined time in the paint, Durant sinking shots like they were bowling balls down a well, 21 times (for 42 points) in a row.

We think about, or at least I do, that they were two entirely different teams to start and end the season. Not different in the sense that these guys came such a long way with what they had, but in the sense that these are entirely different guys. Jarrett Allen, Caris LeVert, Taurean Prince, Garrett Temple, gone. When it happened it felt like a train heist for Cleveland and the Pacers, landing Allen and LeVert, but the speed at which those two were loaded up and sent away made it seem like Sean Marks scooted into the seat of the station master, frantically calling down the tracks as to what bend in the line would be best for faking a lady who turns out to be a bandit tied to the tracks (I haven’t mentioned Rodions Kurucs yet, on purpose, but he’d’ve been a great option to swap for the fake lady and leave there, like they did in old Westerns with the conductor, once the heist was said and done). All of a sudden the team went from almost to everything. From a group of scrappy, smart, awkward up-and-comers you could believe in, who were boundless — at least in the first half of the season’s expectations — to three dudes down from Olympus for an obligatory visit to ruin some mortal lives and were waylaid by their own reflections. And Blake Griffin didn’t even get there until March.

The clean split into before and after is also why I don’t buy heartbreak as the appropriate feeling for what happened to the Nets in the playoffs. They got knocked out, but they weren’t after this thing long enough to even be all-in. You can’t mourn for what you never had in the first place.

To win, the Nets have to quit thinking about the Nets, about what the Nets can look like. It’s like sitting in the middle of a pile of screws and planks and anchors, all the parts and pieces you need to make a desk, and deciding you want a bookshelf. What it could be is over, what it can be we’ve already seen, what it is is right there, walking around Paris, cradling an infant, gleefully getting into fights on Twitter, what it all amounts to will be for next season to figure out but at the minimum those three distinct silhouettes need to be stitched together, so the shape of all that promise cast out onto the court is half as imposing as we’ve been made to believe. Otherwise this is all just shadow tricks, hands clasped together to throw the outline of a wolf for any eyes tired enough to believe it against the wall, feints for fangs, a really expensive game.