Nets won’t try Reggie Miller’s crazy Kevin Durant-James Harden idea for Game 6
Reggie Miller floated the crazy idea late Tuesday night admittedly just to “see what the responses will be,” wondering whether the Nets should sit both James Harden and Kevin Durant in Game 6 in Milwaukee due to their heavy workloads — and KD’s historic performance — in nudging the Nets ahead, 3-2, in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
The retired NBA postseason star and provocative TNT analyst’s faulty premise — to “push all your chips to the center of the table for Game 7” at home — drew mostly strong rebukes and guffaws on social media.
Have no fear, of course, the Nets don’t appear to be considering such a risky ploy, not when anything can happen in a decisive seventh game.
Steve Nash said Wednesday that while Kyrie Irving (ankle) remains sidelined, Harden “is available” to play Thursday night at Fiserv Forum, despite logging a whopping 46 minutes on the balky hamstring that knocked him out of all but one minute of the first four games of the series.
Durant also hardly sounded like someone even remotely considering sitting out a potential closeout game following his otherworldly performance — a 49-point triple-double while playing all 48 minutes — in Game 5 at Barclays Center.
“We’ve got a Game 6. I can’t celebrate. We’ve got another game to try to finish it out,” Durant said after leading Tuesday’s comeback from a 17-point second-half deficit. “To be honest I don’t even rank or look at performances. Once they happen I just try to move on and see if I can do it again.”
Advancing to their first Eastern Conference finals since 2003 won’t be an easy task Thursday night for the Nets against Giannis Antetokounmpo and a desperate Bucks squad looking to avoid a second-round elimination for the second straight year. Brooklyn is winless in four games in Milwaukee this season, dropping both Game 3 and Game 4 after grabbing a 2-0 series lead.
Nash stressed Wednesday in a Zoom call that Durant and Harden “feel good” and came through Tuesday’s grueling victory “fine.”
“Played a lot of minutes. Lot of heavy burden on them, but they both came through really well and feel good this morning,” Nash added. “I think it’s something that we have to feel out as we go. There is no championship if you don’t get out of this series.
“There’s obviously a point where you have to go and you have to play like we did [Tuesday] night. If it presents itself that we don’t have to overburden them, we’d be happy not to, but if we have to, we have to, and that’s just the nature of it.”
Asked what it will take for the Nets to win Game 6 on the road with the Bucks desperate to extend their season, Nash said: “We always start with the fundamentals. Sticking to the game plan. Great competitive spirit. Connectivity. We can go into how much time you have on every detail of the game, but the reality is the non-negotiables. The fight, the spirit and togetherness is where I’d start, before I move on to the next categories.”
Nash did acknowledge the rash of injuries to star players around the NBA throughout the postseason, with Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard (knee) and Suns point guard Chris Paul (health and safety protocols) the latest big names to be sidelined. Harden, Irving, Anthony Davis, Donovan Mitchell, Mike Conley, Jamal Murray, Jaylen Brown, Kemba Walker and several other players also have missed games during the postseason due to injuries.
“I think that the championship this year will be decided on health, as much as anything,” Nash said. “I don’t know [if it’s] the shortened offseason [from last year’s pandemic bubble] as much as the condensed schedule [this season].
“I think we’re seeing a lot of players who just had an incredibly intense workload for a number of months now. That’s just difficult, you’re playing four games a week basically over the course of four or five months. … That’s just a lot, and it catches up with you. So I think it’s understandable why we’re seeing that, and that’s what the parameters are. It’s a battle of attrition this season, as much as it is anything.”
