The unstructured talent of the Brooklyn Nets succumbed to the corporate spirit of the Boston Celtics. The team of Jayson Tatum, Marcus Smart, Jalen Brown and company certified the failure of the troop led by Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, who fell 116-112 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and said goodbye to a disappointing season with a resounding 4 -0 in the first round of the playoffs of the NBA. Boston will face the winner of the tie between the Bucks and the Bulls, dominated (3-1) by Milwaukee, in the Eastern Conference semifinals, while the Nets head back to the couch.
“It’s tough on an emotional level,” Irving managed to explain after the historic disaster of the Brooklyn franchise. “We are disappointed and sad because we didn’t play as a team,” analyzed the 30-year-old point guard, trying to turn the page quickly. “Starting in October we will try to put together a good start, start fresh and focus only on the results and not on what the media say,” said Irving, who reviewed the list of circumstances that marked the Los Angeles season as extenuating circumstances. Nets, among others, his absence in the games played at home until March for not complying with the coronavirus vaccination requirement. “We have to face the facts… I was out, Kev [Durant] he was out, James Harden was traded… it was a combination of many things that happened. That’s how it’s hard to hit the key,” said Irving, who asked in an abstract way that, starting next year, the Nets be talked about “as a team” and not as a group of stars, and stressed that he intends to comply with the option on his contract to stay in Brooklyn. “I don’t plan to go anywhere. I am looking forward to building the project with the boys, ”he closed.
More analytical was Durant, who in his praise for Boston uncovered all the Nets’ shortcomings on the track. “They were better, we couldn’t play like them. They are the best defense in the league, they shot with high percentages, they killed us with the rebounds and we… we looked at each other. We couldn’t compete in that”, assured the 33-year-old forward, who had 39 points, seven rebounds and nine assists in the fourth game of the series. “You have to give credit to the Celtics, they have options to do something big in these playoffs”, he added before completing a little self-critical review of the season. “I have no regrets, these things happen,” he commented bluntly when asked, among other things, about his sports relationship with Kyrie Irving and James Harden. “This summer will be very important for our team. We’ll see where we get to,” said Durant, who showed his confidence in Steve Nash as the right figure to lead the new project.
Words that Nash himself picked up also with a look to the future. “I think we’ve all grown a lot because of the adversity we’ve overcome. In this series, at this point in the season, the summary of all that has been noted: the lack of size, not having two pieces [Ben Simmons y Joe Harris] of our four top players, having to rotate very long… We played against a great team, with big and intelligent players who know how to defend and know how to do everything. My congratulations to the Celtics and I am proud of our players”, reviewed the Nets coach, cementing the illusions for the next course in the two absent players. “Ben Simmons and Joe Harris will give us a big boost. We’ll see how the rest of the roster fills out, but we should be excited to get them back. They are two players with size and one of them is All-Star”, he affected. “This will allow some players to get back to their natural positions where they don’t have to defend such big players all season long and have to push more than necessary. I think they are going to help us a lot in the future”, Nash completed.
The shock wave of Harden’s trade to the Sixers in early February continued until last night in Brooklyn. Daryl Morey, the executive who saw Harden rise in Houston and now holds the position of president of operations in the Philadelphia 76ers, fulfilled his longing and also resolved the entrenched problem with Ben Simmons. The 25-year-old Australian base, one of the stars on which the Sixers founded the project started in 2013 to reach the top of the NBA, baptized as The Process, He asked for the transfer in August of last year and then, in October, he claimed that he was not mentally ready to play. With the movement of pieces, Harden, 33, left to form a pair with Embiid in one of the pick and roll brightest in the American league. And in Brooklyn the famous and controversial Big Three [Harden, Irving, Durant], which evolved from glitter to farce, with the Irving anti-vaccine case as a distorting element. But the back problems of Simmons, number 1 of the draft of 2016, have prevented him from reinforcing an eroded group that closed the season receiving a rout historic Boston.
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