So… the Nets?
Consider this a short sequel to last week’s piece on the Los Angeles Lakers’ disastrous season…
Yesterday, the Brooklyn Nets were eliminated from the playoffs, becoming the only team to get swept in the first round. Now, three years after Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving first teamed up and joined the Nets, Brooklyn has exactly one playoff series win to show for it. At least the Lakers have the 2020 championship to show for themselves, but the Nets “super team” seems like a total failure.
To be fair, I don’t think the last two Nets seasons have been quite as aimless as this Lakers season has been. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that, for the first two months after they acquired James Harden, the Nets really did seem dominant. Before he strained his hamstring, Harden recorded a dozen triple-doubles and won Player of the Month twice. Kyrie Irving adapted well to playing off the ball, and the team went 29-10 in the first two months after the trade.
Of course, injuries derailed them in the playoffs, and this year was a disaster, between the Irving vaccine stuff, Harden forcing a trade to Philadelphia, and the recent drama around Ben Simmons. In much the same way that nobody seemed to miss the Lakers this postseason, NBA fans seemed to relish watching the Nets get swept by the Celtics.
The question of how we—as in, We on the Left—ought to feel about these super teams comes up over and over again in the NBA. As I wrote last week, there is something depressing about the way these teams are constructed as pure amalgams of talent. It suggests that ability is something that exists innately in individual players, as opposed to being a byproduct of the conditions of your labor. So watching the Nets lose—especially to a team like the Celtics, who are not built around any one star, but an assortment of great players, particularly the trio of Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Marcus Smart, who seem to bring out the best in each other—seems to validate a more worker-friendly theory of roster construction.
But so much of the hate directed at super teams is tinged with the anti-labor idea that players should have no say in who they play for, or who they play with. So a part of me always feels obligated to defend them.
Last night, though, something crystallized a little with this postgame quote from Irving:
In case it’s not clear, “Joe and Sean” are Joe Tsai and Sean Marks, the owner and GM, respectively of the Brooklyn Nets. When I read quotes like this, it makes me very cynical about the so-called star empowerment era—it sounds like these guys just want to be management. It’s all well and good to talk about how workers should not be subject to the whims of ownership, and that it’s fair for players to have a say in who their coach is or who their teammates are. But the stars who really benefit from this system don’t see themselves as opposed to ownership—they see themselves as part of it.
The star empowerment era probably deserves a longer, deeper dive at some point, but for now let it suffice that hating the Nets does not make you anti-labor. Irving just told you—he’s part of the ownership class anyway…