The Nets are absolutely tired of letting talented people get away with whatever they want. Their solution is to hire Ime Udoka.
Oh, sure. Makes perfect sense.
Udoka apparently misbehaved so much with the Boston Celtics that they basically fired him without firing him, even after a wildly successful season. If the Nets are the place for Udoka, as ESPN and Sports Illustrated have reported, then I wonder whether they’ll give him the full employee handbook or the limited-edition Kyrie Irving version, in which half the pages are ripped out.
There have been many worse-run franchises in NBA history. Heck, the Nets have been managed more poorly for most of their existence. But what we’re seeing now in Brooklyn is obscenity as art: a franchise that seems determined to win in as many unseemly ways as possible.
It started, of course, with the genius idea to, functionally, turn the team over to a smug, antisemitic conspiracy theorist who thinks his $36-million-a-year job is a hobby. Irving has become the exact opposite of what you want from a franchise player: He makes everybody around him look worse.
Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE/Getty Images
Consider the last stand of Steve Nash, which wasn’t much of a stand at all. On his final day as Nets’ coach, Nash was asked about Irving promoting an antisemitic, lie-filled film last Thursday, and he responded with this pathetic piece of spineless gobbledygook:
“There's always an opportunity for us to grow and understand new perspectives,” Nash said Monday night. “I think the organization is trying to take that stance where we can communicate through this. And try to all come out in a better position and [have] both more understanding and more empathy for every side of this debate and situation.”
New perspectives? Every side? Debate? This is a film that denies the Holocaust happened! Was Nash so spooked by the prospect of upsetting Irving that he couldn’t say his star was wrong about literally anything?
Nash did what the whole organization has done for four years—he kowtowed to Irving. When the Nets hired Nash in 2020, he had never even been an assistant coach. They gambled that he could handle the X’s-and-O’s part of the job because he was such a brilliant player. But what they knew—or thought they knew—was that he was a fundamentally decent person who garnered respect and affection from almost everybody. Nash’s in-game acumen was sketchy. But what happened to the person they hired?
Udoka is a better coach than Nash, but he is a laughable choice of a replacement. He is perhaps the candidate least equipped to create the culture of accountability that the Nets so desperately need. Everybody on that team will know Udoka got a long don’t-bother-coming-back suspension in his last job.
The Nets are about to give Irving one more signal that anything goes, and we’ve seen how Irving handles that. Earlier this season, he shared a clip from Alex Jones, who is widely known for peddling the outrageously offensive lie that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. When he was called on it, Irving said he didn’t agree with Jones on Sandy Hook, but what the pundit said about “occults” was “true.” Irving is too arrogant to understand that promoting anything Jones ever says about anything is bad for society.
Imagine telling those families, “Hey, I didn’t agree with that guy when he said you lied about your children being murdered, but putting that aside: He made a good point about something else.”
And yes, if you’re keeping track: That is twice this season that Irving supported somebody who denied a mass murder took place.
His actions are bad enough to damage the reputation of the whole league. The NBA has leaned hard into social justice movements in the last two years, and a lot of good has come from that. But you can’t just dip your toes in and out of those waters when it’s convenient. On Saturday, the league released a statement objecting to Irving without mentioning him by name. Where are the NBA stars condemning Irving’s hate? Is it O.K. to spread hate if you happen to be an All-Star?
No one has looked good here, but the Nets look especially awful. The following sentence is both darkly hilarious and absolutely true: Kevin Durant left Golden State for Brooklyn to show he was a winner.
The shame of it is that Durant has been extraordinary in Brooklyn. He is truly an all-time great. But he has made two big mistakes: wanting to play with Irving in the first place and signing an extension to keep playing with him.
Twice in the past two years, the Nets started to stand up to Irving, then quickly resumed crawling into his arms. The first time was when he refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine, making him ineligible for home games. They said he couldn’t play for them at all, then said “ah, never mind.” Then, after last season, general manager Sean Marks said the Nets “need people here that want to be here, that are selfless, that want to be part of something bigger than themselves,” which was a clear shot at Irving. But then Irving exercised his contract option for this season, and the Nets figured they would make another trip around the sun with a point guard who thinks the Earth is flat.
Predictably, Irving has already made this whole season all about himself. The more the Nets enable him, the worse he behaves. And now Ime Udoka is supposed to fix this mess? Heck of a coach, but he was supposed to be suspended for the whole season. The Nets don’t care. They never do.
