Kevin Durant’s single-minded focus has been and will be winning championships.
And the Nets were apparently just too chaotic for that.
Returning to New York leading the white-hot Suns — who’ll play at the Knicks on Sunday — Durant answered questions put to him by The Post about his tenure across the East River in Brooklyn, about why he forced a move at last season’s trade deadline.
It all came down to the Nets’ maddening inconsistency.
“In Brooklyn? Yeah, it just wasn’t no consistency, no continuity on who we were as a team,” Durant said. “And when you want to win a championship, you’ve got to build an identity from Day 1, and it was just a lot of circumstances that were out of the players’ control that got in the way of us building our continuity.
“That’s just the business of basketball. That’s just the NBA in general. But we all got better as individual players, and we learned a lot from that experience — everybody from executives to players — and we can go about our NBA experience with more knowledge now.”
What did Durant learn from it, from a frustrating 3 ¹/₂ seasons?
“Just how to work with people,” Durant said. “Just how to play in New York City, how to deal with injuries and lineup changes and coaching changes and all that stuff. You’ve got to keep playing, keep leading.
“It was a class on a lot of different things, these last few years. If you didn’t take anything away from it, that’s just shame on you because it was so many deep lessons in this time here.”
The lessons were tough ones.
Durant joined the Nets in 2019, spending the first season rehabbing a ruptured Achilles. The next 2 ¹/₂ seasons were a revolving door of players and coaches, from Kenny Atkinson to Steve Nash (whom Durant tried to get fired) to Jacque Vaughn.
“My goal was to try to bring some normalcy on a daily basis. There was a lot going on at that time,” Vaughn told The Post. “We had a heck of a stretch together, though. We won 18 out of 20 games with him playing at an extremely high level. And I knew the expectations he had, and that’s great for coach is that he’s in this thing to win a title.”
That was the bar from the moment he and Kyrie Irving joined forces: title or bust. The bar raised when James Harden arrived the next season.
But the Big 3 played just 16 games together for a host of reasons, injuries and Irving’s absences from suspensions, leaves and vaccine refusals. Once Ben Simmons replaced Harden, the new trio logged just 441 minutes in 24 games. The instability makes the Suns’ seven lineups so far seem a model of consistency.
“This guy knows what we went through the last few years in Brooklyn,” Durant said, nodding toward The Post reporter. “It’s always about next-man-up mentality in this league. Guys get hurt, guys not in the lineup. You get paid to be a pro for a reason. Guys have got to step up and just play the games. … You see the character of a team when you’re mixing lineups and got to fight through adversity like that.”
Whatever Durant saw in the character of the Nets prompted him to ask for a trade to the Suns in the summer of 2022. When Phoenix refused to include Mikal Bridges, the Nets flat refused to move him.
It wasn’t until Nets GM Sean Marks and owner Joe Tsai pried Bridges away that the deal finally went through in February. Now, the Suns have won an NBA-high six straight, and Durant is starting to see his vision come to life.
“I did try [to move earlier], they just refused to get rid of me,” Durant said. “I tried, but time ran out. I wasn’t going to miss no games because of this whole thing. So once the season rolled around, I was just like, whatever happens, it happens, and I just get ready for the season. So it worked out perfect timing, the way it’s supposed to.”
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