There are a lot of NBA teams who would love to have problems the Nets have right now. We can start with the Knicks, back under .500 and back behind the play-in cutline, but there are plenty of other teams who wouldn’t mind waking up Friday morning and discovering the following things in their favor:
• First place in the East.
 • A 17-8 record, worse than only three teams out west (Golden State, Phoenix, Utah).
•  Kevin Durant cashing your checks every first and 15th days of the month.
So yes: there will be no telethons held for the Nets, even if they somehow lost to the Rockets Wednesday night (sans Durant), even if they were lucky to escape their Texas two-step of Dallas and Houston with a split, with an intriguing road game in Atlanta coming up Friday.
Still: 25 games is 25 games, and that’s enough of a sample size to make one simple declaration:
The Nets need Kyrie Irving. They need him in their lineup. They will certainly need him — assuming that if and when he returns he’s a reasonable facsimile of his old self — in the playoffs. Whether the need is a change in local vaccination mandates or a change of heart by the player himself, the Nets can no longer pretend that playing without Irving is normal.
Or even reasonably hopeful.
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Now, look: this isn’t exactly neon-colored breaking news, OK? You remove one of the great players of any generation from any team, there will be consequences. And if Irving had hurt his ankle, or broken a wrist, any of the standard things that keep a star away from his team, there wouldn’t be an extra later attached to this.
But this isn’t standard. This is Irving making a choice — which is his right — at a time when such choices are of enormous impact. Whether or not you agree with Irving’s decision that has already cost him more than a quarter of a season, it is impossible not to land on the same conclusion:
The Nets, minus Irving, will not win an NBA title this year.
And that is what the Nets’ raison d’etre is, after all. They were put together in this way to play for titles — for multiple titles — and we already saw last spring just how delicate a proposition that is. The Nets had a hobbled James Harden and an absent Irving thanks to an ankle sprain for most of the Milwaukee series. They lost that Milwaukee series. It is a feel-good narrative to believe that it was simply the Bucks’ time, that this was simply fulfilling Giannis Antetokounmpo’s basketball destiny. That’s a sweet story.
But if you’re a Nets fan, you know differently. You know that the Nets fell a quarter of a sneaker size shy of making the East finals, that if the Nets had been fully operational the Bucks would have been watching the next two rounds at home.
More to the point: the Nets have to believe that, too.
Because they didn’t just see a gold-spackled path to the title evaporate on them last year, they are living the same exact journey now. They Nets are winning 68 percent of their games, and if they keep that up they will win 56 of them, and that will earn them a top-three seed, and with a full arsenal that’s a good place to be.
But the Nets are winning 0 percent of their games, so far, against any of the league’s genuinely good teams — they’re 0-6 against the Bucks, Bulls, Heat, Suns and Warriors. Even without Irving, you have to believe the Nets will figure out a way to win a few of those games the rest of the way.
But when they need to?
Without Irving running the show?
Not a chance. Not a prayer. They will still be a fun team to watch every night because Durant is still Earth’s greatest player, and there are plenty of times he and Harden can team to take your breath away and make you leap to your feet, stolen moments when the Nets can still look like the best basketball show around.
But champions?
Without Irving?
No shot.