Forget the next couple of months: Next Year has already arrived for the Nets. Their grand plan has officially begun. The clock has already begun to tick. And will only echo louder in the days and weeks to follow.
This has been an unprecedented season in so many ways for Nets fans, as they wait on Kevin Durant. Sure, other fans have had to exhibit patience before. Celtics fans spent most of 1979 getting to know Larry Bird as he played a brilliant senior season at Indiana State (while Boston was cratering at 29-53), knowing they owned Bird’s junior-eligible draft rights.
Spurs fans waited two long years for David Robinson to fulfill his military commitment while watching their team lose 112 out of 164 games. Injuries wiped out the rookie seasons of Blake Griffin and Ben Simmons, forcing Clippers and Sixers fans to press the “pause” button on their respective processes.
None of those players was this player, though. None of them arrived as shoo-in, ready-made, first-ballot Hall of Famers in their presumptive prime. Surely, there were times this year when Nets fans allowed themselves to drift into daydream, and think about what might happen if Durant suddenly announced, sometime around the end of March: “I’m back.”
Surely, that impulse was never stronger than on the night of Jan. 31, when Kyrie Irving dropped 54 points in 32 minutes in a 133-118 beating of the Bulls, shooting 19-for-23 from the field, 9-for-10 from 3, as brilliant a performance as the sport allows.
And why not? There’s no law against dreaming. Irving’s first season with the Nets has been a study in frustration on a lot of levels — who saw that coming, am I right? — but for 32 pristine minutes of basketball that Friday night, it would’ve taken superhuman effort NOT to think about that version of Kyrie, and the pre-Achilles version of Durant, and the look of sheer panic in the eyes of a No. 2 seed like the Celtics or Raptors having to figure out how to deal with THAT in the first round.
It was a fun dream.
But, then, so is the other one you have, about winning Powerball. Or fronting the E Street Band. Or buying the Mets.
Eventually, reality returns. And reality for the Nets arrived, for good, Wednesday morning when, in a video for Bleacher Report, Durant was asked by Taylor Rooks if there was any chance he’d be coming back this year.
“Nah,” he said with a smile, “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so? Or no?” Rooks asked. “Because those are two different things.”
“No,” he said. “The best thing for me is to continue to rehab, get as strong as I can and focus on next season.”
That news, paired with Tuesday’s that Irving aggravated his shoulder, means that the Nets, officially, are the first NBA team to reset its clock for the 2020-21 season. The Nets are safely in the playoffs, some five games up on Washington (and two up on eighth-place Orlando), and getting some more postseason reps is never a bad thing for the players who will be a part of next year’s roster.
In truth, it’s probably best that the Nets’ overall focus begins to shift toward next year anyway because if their waiting-on-Kevin game has been a unique adventure, so is what awaits them from here. For rarely has a team in any sport faced what the Nets will face, starting next year: an all-or-nothing quest for a championship.
Teams have made epic one-year climbs before; the 2008 Celtics hop to mind. But the ’07 team that lost 58 games didn’t have Kevin Garnett or Ray Allen anywhere near the team. That team was put together in an offseason blur. It won 66 games and a title before there could even be a hype buildup.
This is different. This is already 7½ months into what will either be a crowning moment for Brooklyn or an epic failure for a franchise already wallpapered with them. The Nets have never been bashful about what last summer’s spending spree meant. It was championship or bust then — with a yearlong grace period. It is ever more so now.
The grace period is over. The present incarnation of the Nets — mostly scrappy and easy-to-root-for — will get a few playoff moments in April, and that will be that, and everyone else can turn their attention to the main event. For the Nets, that already started, as of Wednesday morning.
Durant is doing the right thing sticking to his schedule. Irving would be wise to follow suit. And starting now, the clock is ticking until we see if the Nets’ plan was a brilliant basketball blueprint …
Or something else.