Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and the secret origin story of the Nets superteam

By Matt Sullivan
Author, "Can't Knock the Hustle"

Jan. 25, 2019; Weston, Massachusetts

Kyrie Irving invited his old friend Kevin Durant for dinner at his mansion, a seven-bedroom spread in the woods of suburban Boston that did not feel particularly lived in. This was the night before the two-time defending-champion Warriors played the Celtics on network television, and Kyrie was battling the flu. That didn’t stop the wine from flowing, because Kyrie was a gracious host — Michael B. Jordan planned to stop by when he was in town — and nothing could stop Kyrie from getting what he wanted, which was to move the hell out.

Despite his misgivings about the racialized history of Boston sports fans, Kyrie had told the Celtics crowd that he wanted to re-sign for the long term at a fan appreciation event in the fall of 2018. But three weeks after that, his grandfather died, sending Kyrie into a sudden spiral of depression for which he’d deeply regret not seeking therapy. From that moment, he would tell his old friend Kevin Durant, "life became way more important than basketball. Anything I was doing in basketball, I didn’t really care." 

By the time KD arrived at his temporary mansion for their unfinished business, Kyrie had grown sick of creating a social distance from Celtics teammates for days at a time or else, as he was that month in January 2019, pointing fingers at them in public, especially around a loss in Brooklyn. He’d tried to stop internalizing the media’s misperception of his ego. He’d tried to be more present for his three-year-old daughter. To treat his job like a job. But self-care could begin professionally, on his own terms. He’d been charting a path home, by way of his boyhood team: the Nets. 

Adapted from the book CAN’T KNOCK THE HUSTLE: Inside the Season of Protest, Pandemic, and Progress with the Brooklyn Nets' Superstars of Tomorrow by Matt Sullivan. Copyright © 2021 by Matt Sullivan. From Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

At the same time, the Warriors’ road trip had brought KD to Boston from Washington, and he told Kyrie how the players had visited with Barack Obama for an hour in private at his office. Obama was a hooper, but he’d talked golf with Steph Curry and given props to Klay Thompson for still reading the newspaper every morning. Mostly, though, the president had gotten animated around his conference-room table when he heard that KD had just opened his after-school facility, at home in PG County, Maryland. KD had noticed an Obama quote on the wall at The Durant Center: Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Going home and doing good had lingered in Kyrie’s mind, and the Brooklyn Nets were a team he and KD could manipulate — two max-salary slots, a flexible general manager, a few pieces, maybe even some room for their friend DeAndre Jordan — while Kyrie built a house in Jersey for his daughter, and perhaps more children yet, to grow up in. KD told a confidant that he didn’t think the Warriors would get any better if Steve Kerr couldn’t hold Draymond Green accountable for his outbursts, and that he was occasionally irked when Steph got so much attention from the media and from the fans. Kyrie and KD, on the cusp of their free agency, shared a loner’s longing to settle down but look straight ahead.

"He didn’t like what his situation was," KD later said, "and me either in Golden State. And it was just like, ‘Hey, man, let’s just see how this would work. Let’s try it out.’ And DJ wanted to play with us to be that center for us that can kinda hold it down, and play for something, really — play for a team that’s going somewhere, not just keep moving around and bouncing around to leave."

Having left OKC nearly three years earlier and experiencing the rage of its fans upon his "revenge game" with the Warriors, KD didn’t feel as bad about bailing on a franchise and its fan base. As he advised the All-Star Gordon Hayward on his 2017 free-agency choice to leave behind the team that drafted him, "You don’t owe anybody anything." And by 2019, KD’s own Warriors teammate Andre Iguodala had guilt-free advice for his friend. "At this point, f--- everybody," Andre told him. "That’s including management, anybody — from this team to that team, fans, whoever. Do whatever makes you happy, man, and don’t feel like you’re letting anybody down with any decision that you make."

KD would follow Kyrie’s lead. That night in the suburbs, he even ate a vegan burger for the first time. "I could f--- with this," he said. A super-team was starting to be formed, over a side of kale salad and... clink.

KD and Kyrie went upstairs to the playroom, shared a vegan smoothie, shot a Nerf ball into a toy hoop and played NBA2K. Controlling miniature versions of themselves and their teammates, like marionettes, they wondered how else they could string together a team that was going somewhere. "And from that point," Kyrie said, "we took the power back and put it in our hands."

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May 31, 2019; West Orange, New Jersey

Kyrie had been making power moves, on his new company, on his new house, on his new roster, even though the 2019 NBA free-agency window hadn’t opened yet, officially. Now, he traveled solo through the empty streets of gingerbread suburbia, Manhattan hiding below the tree line, to his old middle school, where he was already planning to host a contract-signing ceremony, out of sight, so that his secret decision might remain safe.

Kyrie was 27 years old, with a couple hundred million to his name. He appreciated that he could still, on the same wandering stroll between his childhood home and his homeroom class, run into the neighborhood crossing guard.

When school let out at Roosevelt Middle School those days, Black kids and white kids wore Kyrie’s signature Nike sneakers, in white and black and so many rainbow flavors. An Indian-American boy sprinted to catch the bus in a sky-blue pair. A purple-haired girl rode her purple skateboard in her purple Kyries. There were Kyries with the logo from "Friends," Kyries dedicated to the cereals he ate; like Michael Jordan’s face covered every Wheaties box on every kitchen counter in the ’90s, Kyrie would put his symbol of impact upon the feet of the teenagers of his time.

And there it was, in the dirt at the front door to his junior high, imprinted from the sole of the Nike Kyrie 5s: the all-seeing eye, trapped inside a pyramid — the symbol of the Illuminati, and the unofficial logo of Kyrie Irving’s peculiar brand of headiness. Kyrie was, as influencers went, a pretty heady dude. He wanted to challenge the foundational lies of America and his private-school upbringing: He’d been rediscovering his late mother’s Sioux heritage, and he’d been reading, at the suggestion of the late rapper Nipsey Hussle, "The Spook Who Sat by the Door," about a Black revolutionary who uses his government training to expose police brutality and political corruption. And in 2017, on a show hosted by his teammates, Kyrie had traveled, quite notoriously, a bit too far out there: "The Earth is flat."

Kyrie didn’t actually believe this conspiracy theory, he reminded friends and colleagues. Thing is, teenagers paid more attention to @KyrieIrving than to their teachers, and at times even to the great American attention vacuum itself, @realDonaldTrump: Kyrie had the third most online fan engagement of any athlete in the NBA, and, in 2019, Instagram’s most-followed NBA players drove more engagement to the leading social-media platform than did the most followed politicians in the land.

"People want to hear from the personas that they look up to — they want to hear from people who they feel are being authentic and real with them — and that’s hard to come by in politics," the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, told me.

Or, as Myles Price, the seventh-grade star of the Roosevelt Middle School Rough Riders, said: "All of Kyrie’s IG posts are inspiring—even the weird ones."

When Kyrie was in middle school, he was inspired enough to, immediately after his father took him to watch their New Jersey Nets at the 2003 NBA Finals, scratch a home-team daydream into the sheetrock of his bedroom closet: I AM GOING TO THE NBA!! Promise. Kyrie could still smell the popcorn from the nosebleeds, 16 years later, as he headed straight for the principal’s office.

He liked to chop it up with Principal Hush, who was a Knicks fan — "Boston is Boston," they agreed — and who did not pry too hard on Kyrie’s free-agency window.

"Still," Principal Hush reminded his famous alum, "there’s a lahhhhhhtta talk..."

The reverb surrounding the school, out there in the humming echo of sport, was as infuriating as it had become impossible to ignore. LeBron "likes" Kyrie in a Lakers jersey, offered SportsCenter’s analysis on Twitter, about a post on Instagram. On the radio, pundits were closing in on Kyrie’s destination: It’s going to be in New York — and whether it’s going to be the Knicks or the Nets remains to be seen. On TV: When you start to connect the dots, it says Nets. But... REALLY?

"Lahhhhhhtta options," Principal Hush continued.

Kyrie looked up behind the principal’s desk, at portraits of Obama and MLK, and looked his elder in the all-seeing eye.

"I’m comin’ home."

"Aight!" Principal Hush called out, already beginning to ask himself the obvious next question: Which home? Madison Square Garden, with the Knicks? Or Barclays Center, in Brooklyn? He left his curiosity at a piqued eyebrow and led the graduate to the court. Kyrie’s mission in visiting here, besides the walk down memory lane, was to make sure he could use the school gym in a month or so, for a celebration with his friends, alongside dignitaries from his new team — whichever uniform its players might wear — including Jay-Z, the boss of his new agency, who’d just been named the first billionaire rapper. Kyrie wanted to mark the moment, for himself and for his 13 million followers, with a carefully orchestrated act of authenticity.

"Oh," Kyrie said on his way out, "I’ll be wearing all-black."

"Oh-KAY!" The principal knew what that meant: Legend had it, Jay-Z had designed the black-and-white jerseys for the Nets. In fact, franchise brass had paid off logo designers $20,000 to say that he did, while Jay-Z convinced Adam Silver to keep black — to keep Black — in the uniforms. Anyway, they’d look pretty slick on the kids around here, Principal Hush thought, and quickly got back to nodding again, to keep Kyrie’s decision at a whisper.

Kyrie promised to return to Roosevelt Middle School, maybe even to work out on the court they were trying to name after him. He didn’t care if the blue paint was chipping on the walls, because he’d promised Kobe Bryant and his new private shooting instructor, Kobe’s friend Alex Bazzell, that he would grind with an open mind, at any gym in town, to become even better than he knew he was. Kyrie was impatient, but he would commit to the long game.

Later that week, laying out his vision for his basketball future, Kyrie told Bazzell that he wanted to be remembered as one of the greatest point guards in NBA history, and he wanted to win multiple championships in the next few years, back home.

As for the best-ever part, the trainer gently replied, "You know... right now, we’re at the point where, um, people view you as probably the second- or third-best point guard in the current league, not even all-time. Just... right now." Steph Curry, the boy-prince of the Warriors, had two MVP awards to go with three rings and counting, starring on Golden State’s near-perfect lineup of all-time hoopers.

Kyrie nodded heavily.

And on the whole championship thing, uh, "If you don’t mind me asking..."

"Oh, yeah," the trainer remembered Kyrie adding, "we got, you know, Kev’s coming, too."

Kev as in Kevin, as in Kevin Durant, as in KD — the greatest basketball player on this round Earth — who was about to play in the NBA Finals for the Golden State Warriors. And who was — apparently, already, if things kept going according to Kyrie’s plan — destined for the Nets. The Brooklyn Nets.

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June 12, 2019; Manhattan 

KD came to, tubes up his nose, panicking about blood clots. Despite the eight-inch gash in the back of his right leg, doctors told him that the surgery had gone smoothly. Just 36 hours earlier, he’d been showing off pregame dance moves to his teammates on the Warriors, returning from injury straight into the middle of the 2019 NBA Finals. After a month away from the postseason to nurse a calf strain, he’d dropped three-pointer after three-pointer over the Toronto Raptors. He’d talked s---, confidently and comfortably, and lollygagged all the way up the court to drop another one, and played pretty good defense, too, until along came the thwap, and KD’s best-laid plans hung together as flimsily as his torn Achilles tendon. His foot felt slanted, like an entire side of him was twirling clockwise down a hill.

Achilles recovery could take a year, said the surgeon, who was also the Brooklyn Nets orthopedist, and even then he might never be the same player again. KD felt powerless without the game, insisting that his talent was his platform. But the NBA spotlight shined brighter on a superstar’s persona than upon even the shadow of his skill. The game would still be there, KD assured himself, just maybe not at 7:30 every night, in front of nineteen thousand people. Rehab started in 36 hours.

"Yeah, that s--- took a while—that s--- was every day," KD told me. "That s--- felt like: I dread gettin’ up goin’ to work."

The good news was that he didn’t have blood clots after all. And he had much bigger repercussions to worry about: Free agency would begin, at least officially, in two weeks or so, at the end of June.

Since January, KD and Kyrie had been talking seriously about teaming up in Brooklyn. After months of lobbying for KD to take his talents to BK, too, Kyrie was furious that Golden State had placed KD "on a national stage to end up selling a product that came before the person." Kyrie felt he had been forced to play through pain in the 2015 Finals and put at risk by Cleveland’s staff, and he was — if not entirely distrustful of all traditional corporate systems — certainly protective of his best basketball friend.

The friends had grown close in 2016 on Team USA in Rio, where a couple dozen pro hoopers lived, sequestered, on a mega-yacht with room enough for 300 — a kind of Vegas–Disney World hybrid, docked across town to keep the richest and famousest away from the Olympic Village, which had been contaminated by raw sewage. Government scientists and local doctors warned that the plebian quarters reserved for the rest of Team USA were a petri dish prone to viruses and superbacteria that might kill those with vulnerable immune systems and, in any case, would leave non–USA Basketball athletes "swimming in human crap."

Aboard the 514-foot boat, though, cards and cabernet ruled. The poolside air smelled not of s--- but of expensive marijuana. A co-captain of the cruise liner’s party was DeAndre Jordan, who stands six-foot-eleven but is so down-to-earth that he might have sunk a smaller ship with laughter and a foot-stomping love for rock ’n’ roll. DeAndre was everyone’s favorite teammate. And Team USA’s banter in the summer of 2016, naturally, turned to how Kyrie had just bailed out LeBron in the Finals, how best basketball friends squading-up in The Player Empowerment Movement had become so very commonplace, so out-in-the-open while behind-closed-doors, that KD had just signed with Golden State and could be — maybe, already, as the Jay-Z song goes — on to the next one.

DeAndre recalled, in the last days of The Anti-Crap All-Star Pleasure Cruise, a toast.

"Hey," Kyrie told him and KD, "this would be cool to do for real."

"What you mean by that?" DeAndre asked him.

"Let’s all get on the same team," Kyrie said, "and play together."

As the summer of 2019 and his thirty-first birthday approached, KD told his agent and business partner, Rich Kleiman, that he didn’t want free-agency PowerPoints like LeBron had welcomed in 2010. He didn’t need the courtships that he and Rich had sat through, holed up in the Hamptons in 2016, on the way out of OKC. He understood that Kyrie was coming home to his childhood team, and for the first time in their careers, KD and Kyrie felt the employee-employer power dynamic recalibrated toward something closer to fair.

KD texted his dad: What you think about Brooklyn?

Like his agent, KD’s occasionally estranged father, Wayne Pratt, was a Knicks fan. When Wayne told his son that he’d taken a video-conference call from the Knicks executives Steve Mills and Scott Perry, and that the Knicks were trying to turn away KD’s interest from Brooklyn before free agency had officially begun, the father-son text chain blew up with expletives. KD didn’t think it was on anyone else to mess with his personal freedom. Plus, this Knicks meeting seemed to be a violation of the NBA’s rules against tampering, to "entice, induce or persuade" one player under contract to sign somewhere else. The regulations had long been ignored by most executives, but the league office had been cracking down on tampering over the past two years, and the summer of 2019 was thought to be something of a last splash before the commissioner might start collecting iPhones for his culture of "compliance." The NBA’s balance of power was as sensitive as Kevin Durant, and he did not want his pops f---ing with the plan.

Let me explain one f---ing thing to you, his dad responded. Don’t you ever question my integrity. There’s nobody more important in this world when it comes to you THAN YOU.

Well, why can’t I do something different?

The Knicks is Mecca, KD’s dad proclaimed. If you want to do it, do it big! If you want to be a New Yorker, be a Knick!

New York City was the Mecca of basketball, and KD wanted to live there. But he felt like Brooklyn was his vibe: "chill, on the low, all-black everything." He’d been eyeing the Nets for years now, and they him.

Dad shot back: Are you doing this just for Kyrie cuz he your buddy?

No, KD replied. He was making this decision for himself.

KD and his guy Rich agreed to make the announcement, once it was allowed, on the Instagram account of their sports-business TV show, "The Boardroom," which was about The Player Empowerment Movement itself. @TheBoardroom had only thirty thousand followers and had some catching up to do, to KD’s ten million. Why waste any opportunity presented by fame? Why just do it for the fans, when you could do it for the ’Gram?

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June 30, 2019; Brooklyn

The rest of the Nets waited on the rooftop lounge of their practice facility, scanning the waterfront: Lady Liberty’s flaming fist, the towering shimmer of Manhattan and, emerging to the east, out toward their arena and swaying in a hard summer wind, Brooklyn’s cranes in the sky. Up here, 55 blocks away, they claimed as headquarters yet another ex-warehouse in the old neighborhood that new developers had named Industry City, after all the startups trying to expand in the borough and disrupt their businesses as usual — startups not entirely unlike the Brooklyn Nets.

About an hour earlier, Adrian Wojnarowski had broken the news on Twitter...

...but the Nets — their existing young players and holdover coaches, their franchise proprietors and front-office operators, their wives and children, their agents, all manner of experts in the human body — still couldn’t quite believe who was about to arrive downstairs.

Kevin Durant’s small entourage drove by the body shops and the strip club and, passing through the green-light threshold of gentrification, rumbled onto the cobblestone street with the high-end furniture store on the corner, the minimalist coffee shop at ground level and the NBA franchise inside. He knew the organization on the roof was still in what he later called "the garage stage," but arrive he did, prepared for a public offering. "A championship would be a whole other level," KD had ventured, "but injecting a new energy into a city through basketball would be even cooler."

KD zoomed into the party one-legged on a trike and found Kyrie. There were Woo!s and Yessir!s and Oh-KAY!s, but the friends embraced in an official exhale at last: Clink. KD and Kyrie would make $164 and $141 million, respectively, over four years — maximum-value contracts for maximum-profit men. DeAndre, their Olympian amigo, was no longer valued him as a max guy, but his powerful friends viewed him as a starter and an essential presence in the revamped Nets locker room. KD and Kyrie told their agents to go get him $10 million a year, and they did.

Giraffing around the rooftop of Nets HQ, as if chaperoning prom, was a six-foot-ten-inch New Zealander named Sean Marks. He was the general manager who’d inherited one of the NBA’s worst teams in 2016, a franchise not even close to established enough to entice KD when he was a free agent that summer... even though impressing KD with an emergent contender was exactly why the previous GM had traded away so much of Brooklyn’s future to Boston for Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Jason Terry in a 2013 deal that failed spectacularly. So the Nets relied upon a roster of burnouts and castaways to survive 20- and 28-win seasons until they became a 42-win playoff team by 2019, the foundation built for a skyscraping dynasty heading into 2020 and beyond. On the roof of the nearly $50 million HSS Training Center, Marks introduced himself to the friends and loved ones of his new players — there were nine in all, on a roster of 15, arriving one by one as the sun went down — because, he believed, when you had a chance to add future Hall of Famers who wanted to play together, you jumped at it, you healed them, and you kissed the ring.

Kenny Atkinson was not so sure. The Nets head coach had spent three seasons transforming the castaways into near-All-Stars with an 18-hour-a-day combustion of chips on shoulders, analytics and the spacious European game, which he’d played professionally before becoming an assistant with the Knicks a decade earlier. Atkinson had never made the NBA as a player, and he worried that his value would be questioned in the presence of superstars. But KD, in his perfunctory research for accompanying Kyrie to Brooklyn, had loved watching Atkinson’s fun, free-flowing offensive schemes on YouTube, as the coach went brilliantly berserk along the sideline. Atkinson looked like one of those bad guys from The Matrix, in the same black suit and tie every night, his smirk bending into a scowl.

Atkinson had been doing his own scouting of the NBA’s best available franchise players. Seconds after KD crumpled to the floor in the Finals three weeks back, Atkinson had freaked out and talked to Marks: "This could change things," he said, and considered if maybe it should have.

The head coach knew there’d been other options in free agency. There was Kawhi Leonard, who’d just won the title with Toronto over the KD-less Warriors. Atkinson thought he would fit his system, and Kawhi had a relationship with Marks, but Kawhi had indicated to Brooklyn management through back channels in the spring that he was headed home to join the LA Clippers. There was also Jimmy Butler, who had included the budding Nets on his wish list when demanding trades in the past, but he was headed for Miami. Coaches especially understood that personnel decisions could be forced upon them nowadays, that the whole point of The Player Empowerment Movement was for franchise players to control the options. Atkinson thought this was unfair, but the first CEO of a successful startup often had to trade his vision for the vision of his ambitious talent, or else get out of the way.

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"I don’t think there was a moment when Ky took it over from us," a Nets executive involved in his recruitment told me. "We all understood — basically everybody who is following the NBA understands — he’s a personality. But we were at a point where we thought the organization is strong enough, and the culture is strong enough, to survive or absorb different personalities. Whether that assumption is true remains to be seen."

Matt Sullivan has been an editor at The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Esquire and Bleacher Report.