Kevin Durant and the Brooklyn Nets will host Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday night in Brooklyn. I think that Durant should have never left Curry and the Warriors.
View the original article to see embedded media.Kevin Durant and the Brooklyn Nets will host Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors in Brooklyn, New York, at Barclays Center on Tuesday evening.
The game comes at the perfect time, because they are both two of the best teams in the NBA right now.
Coming into the game, the Warriors are 11-2, which is the best record in the entire NBA, and the Nets are 10-4 (9-2 in their last 11 games) and are the third seed in the Eastern Conference.
Durant played with Curry and the Warriors for three seasons, and made the NBA Finals in all three years and won two championships.
During the summer of 2019, Durant and Kyrie Irving signed with the Brooklyn Nets.
I think that Durant should have stayed in Golden State.
Why should Durant have stayed with the Warriors?
Kevin Durant will go down as one of the 25 best players to ever play the game of basketball no matter how his career ends.
In fact, even if he had never won a championship, he'd probably still be considered to be that much of an all-time great.
However, what he does best is score the basketball.
Sure, he can play-make and he can rebound and he can defend, but he is easily a top-ten scorer to ever play the game of basketball.
When he played for the Warriors he fit perfectly, because they were a team that already had a ton of chemistry (had made the NBA Finals twice before he got there), and so he fit in seamlessly as a scorer.
He averaged over 25 points per game in all three seasons and never shot less than 51.6% from the field.
His first season on the Warriors?
He averaged 25.1 points on a career-high 53.7% shooting from the field.
The team was a well-oiled machine.
While the Nets have tons of talent, they do not have a lot of chemistry.
Sure, James Harden is an excellent passer, but he plays a lot of isolation basketball and has the ball in his hands a lot.
This group has also not been together like Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson and Steve Kerr have been for years and years.
Durant fits perfectly on a team that plays unselfish basketball, and where he is plugged in as the scorer as opposed to having to do everything.
Last season, the Nets lost in the second round of the playoffs with Durant, Harden, Blake Griffin, Joe Harris and other good players.
Yes, they did not have Irving at the end of the series, but that illustrates how Durant is better off in a roll where there are multiple play-makers around him, and all he has to do is score the basketball.
In 2013, Russell Westbrook missed the second round of the playoffs with an injury and Durant and the Thunder lost in five games to the Memphis Grizzlies.
Even with Westbrook for many years, the pair never won a title.
Westbrook takes a lot of shots and the team never seemed to figure it all out like the Warriors did with Durant.
None of this is a knock on the 11-time All-Star.
He's going to be one of the best five players in the NBA all season long, and the Nets are going to make the playoffs, but the game would have been a lot easier for him on a team like the Warriors.
He could have won at least another championship if not more if he had stayed on the Warriors.
Can the Nets win a title?
That is still to be seen.
Curry is the most unselfish superstar the game has ever seen, and they have a lot more cohesiveness than the Nets.
If the Nets do win a title, then he did make the right choice, but if they don't; then it will be interesting to wonder how many more titles he could have won with Curry.
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