NEW YORK — Nets forward Markieff Morris likened Kevin Durant’s drama in Brooklyn this offseason to a broken relationship that needs fixing — and head coach Steve Nash said the fixing has been done.
Morris, the veteran forward and soon-to-be center who said the Nets were his No. 1 phone call as a free agent this offseason, said Durant’s offseason standoff with team management is the nature of the NBA.
“You breakup with a girlfriend, you get back with her,” Morris said as training camp kicked off at the HSS Training Facility in Industry City on Tuesday. “Same s---. You air your differences until you figure it out.”
In this instance, Durant found the Nets guilty of lacking both accountability and the culture needed to win a championship. In his second request for a trade, he reportedly told Nets governor Joe Tsai to either trade him or fire both Nash and general manager Sean Marks.
Nash, now, says the air has been cleared and, for the second day in a row, called Durant “family” while leaning on his “long history” with the two-time MVP to smooth things over.
“We’re fine, we’re good. Ever since we talked, it’s been like nothing’s changed,” Nash said on Tuesday. “I love the guy. Families have issues. We had a moment, and it’s behind us. That’s what happens. It’s a common situation in the league.”
Nash suggested the report about Durant wanting him out in the first place wasn’t completely accurate. He said the reports weren’t all the way true even though shortly after they surfaced, Tsai issued a tweet in support of both his coaching staff and his front office.
“I never thought that was a hundred percent [accurate]. It’s not black-and-white like that,” the coach said. “There’s a lot of factors, a lot of things behind the scenes. Lot of things reported are not accurate. Lot of things that are reported are not 100 percent accurate. So you get fragmented bits of truth. You get things that are flat-out not true. It’s the nature of the media these days.
“I never really get caught up in all that stuff. I’m going to hear it from Kevin when the time is right. I’m going to talk to Sean. I’m going to talk to all the parties involved. You just work through it step by step. You don’t overreact. You stay calm and work on communication and facts and here we are.”
Nash also said he wasn’t “overly concerned” when reports surfaced that Durant wanted him fired.
“It was something I thought we would address in time and we did and here we are and we’re looking forward,” said Nash. “There’s something in this we can all grow from as well. Sometimes when things like that happen the outside world makes a big deal of it. From the inside, we take it as an opportunity for growth. I think we’re in a really good position to start the season.”
Nash did admit that some air-clearing needed to occur, especially after a second season with championship expectations came to an end via a first-round sweep at the hands of the Boston Celtics.
The Nets started as one of the most promising teams in all of basketball last season, even claiming the East’s No. 1 seed with an early 27-15 record. Then Durant suffered an MCL sprain that sidelined him for a month and a half. At the time, Joe Harris was already out for the season with an ankle injury, and with Kyrie Irving’s limited availability due to the pre-existing vaccine mandate for professional athletes, the Nets went into a tailspin and lost 11 straight games while James Harden orchestrated his way out of Brooklyn in the midseason trade for Ben Simmons.
Durant used that 11-game losing streak as one of the reasons why he requested a trade, suggesting the team relied on him too much and didn’t hold players accountable during his absence.
Nash said there wasn’t any more “kicking and screaming” he could do to change the course of events during that streak. He pointed to the depleted roster and the landscape of the NBA when the Nets went on the losing streak that unraveled their season.
“Oh, I did plenty of that [kicking and screaming]. I think the biggest thing was we had a group of guys that were playing way outside of what their roles should be,” Nash said. “So we knew going into that period, we’re not going to win many games here. ... When you’re playing three or four non-shooters in the NBA, most teams have none or one on the floor. There’s challenges and we knew that we could see that coming.”
Now with a roster touting a mostly clean bill of health, with clean air wafting about the franchise, and with Irving projecting to be full-time with no vaccine mandate keeping him off the court, Nash doesn’t foresee the same amount of adversity his team faced last season. And he doesn’t foresee any hiccups with Durant, because no one wins when the family feuds.
Morris believes Durant and the Nets will work things out because he can speak from personal experience with his own relationship.
“Yeah, I mean, broke up with my wife a couple [of] times. We’re still married,” he said. “S--- works. Sometimes you need space to figure some things out. S--- works. It is what it is.”
