When James Harden told Kyrie Irving he wanted out of Brooklyn, the star guard couldn't believe it.
During the 2020-21 season, the Brooklyn Nets completed a trade that brought together a "Big 3" that was sure to bring the city a whole haul of future championships, consisting of Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden.
But it's hard to win championships when one of them is injured for most of his time there, the other one causes more issues off the court than showcases his skills on, and the third is just flat out fed up with it all.
That Big 3 ended up only playing a grand total of 16 games together while they were on the Nets, not even a quarter of a full NBA season.
Durant suffered an Achilles injury that kept him sidelined for a majority of the year, and Irving's refusal to receive a mandated vaccine for COVID-19 caused him to also miss games throughout the year.
In the 2021-22 year, Harden would request a trade out of Brooklyn, a move that, at the time, shocked Irving.
In a recent Twitch stream that the former No. 1 pick recorded, he reacted to an episode of the "Mind the Game" podcast that featured his former teammate Kevin Durant as well as NBA legend Steve Nash, who was the head coach at the time that the "Big 3" were in Brooklyn, talking about what went wrong during that time.
As he watched, the now-Mavericks star told a story about a conversation he had with the former MVP Harden just one day before he requested out of the Nets.
"It shocked a lot of people. It shocked me," Irving said on the stream. "(Expletive), I was talking to James one day, and I'm like (expletive), bro, we about to go win these championships, and it was like a day later, asked for a trade. I understood completely."
Fast forward a couple of years after Harden was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers, and Durant and Irving would also request and be granted their own trades, heading to the Phoenix Suns and Mavericks, respectively, and even Nash was let go from his head coaching role shortly before the other two stars departed due to the controversies surrounding the team at the time.
Category: Basketball
