James Harden, Kevin Durant And Kyrie Irving Are A Disaster Waiting To Happen For Brooklyn Nets

As soon as Kyrie Irving takes the court with James Harden and Kevin Durant Wednesday night at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland, it’ll become official for the Brooklyn Nets.

They’ll dribble (and dribble and dribble) into The Most Dysfunctional Team Of Potential Greatness In Sports History.

No doubt, Irving, Harden and Durant are future James Naismith Basketball Hall of Famers, and they’re also loaded. While Durant ranks No. 24 on the Forbes 2020 Celebrity 100 Earnings list at $63.9 million, Harden is No. 54 at $47.8 million, and Irving is No. 74 at $41.9 million.

They’re Robins in search of Batmans, though.

When Irving had his Batman named LeBron James with the Cleveland Cavaliers, he earned a 2016 NBA championship ring. Later, after he went to Boston for two seasons, he lacked anything close to a Cape Crusader, and his Celtics didn’t come close to winning it all.

Durant’s Batman with the Golden State Warriors was Stephen Curry along the way to consecutive world titles through 2018.

Curry isn’t with Durant in Brooklyn.

As for Harden, well, um. He has a pretty resume. He’s a three-time NBA scoring champion, and he’s a former league most valuable player, and he’s the owner of eight trips to the All-Star Game. It’s just that, during his 11 trips to the playoffs, he has spent more time vanishing than flourishing.

There’s also this: Unless NBA honchos changed the rules within the last few minutes, you only have one basketball during games.

Which is why this is joke: According to Caesars Sportsbook by William Hill, mesmerized or something by Harden finagling his way this month to slip away from the Houston Rockets to join fellow NBA vagabonds Irving and and Durant in their first full season together in Brooklyn, the Nets just surpassed the Milwaukee Bucks, the Philadelphia 76ers, the Celtics and everybody else as the team to beat in the Eastern Conference.

Here’s the punch line: Did I mention there’s just one basketball during games?

Within the last decade, Durant is the only NBA player who has loved hugging the ball more than Harden.

Or is it the other way around?

Actually, it’s Irving, especially since he leads all of his peers in usage rate in clutch time (the last five minutes with the score within five points) during the past 10 years at 43%, and Durant joins Harden in the top four.

Speaking of Irving, he’s a bit different.

He returns to the Nets after missing their last seven games, including five for what he called “personal reasons.” In the end, the NBA fined the temperamental point guard $50,000 for violating health and safety protocols by attending something like a family birthday party, and he was docked another $800,000 in salary for skipping a couple of games while in quarantine.

Irving wasn’t around for Harden’s two-game debut with Durant. Yes, the Nets won both games, but they also foreshadowed nightmares to come for the defensively challenged trio by allowing an average of 119 points for each of those games.

In other words . . .

Congratulations, Kobe, Shaq, Karl and Gary.

You’re off the hook.

Those James Naismith Basketball Hall of Famers, with the last names of Bryant, O’Neal, Malone and Payton, respectively, gathered with the Los Angeles Lakers for one season, and they were a bust. They were clobbered that summer of 2004 in the NBA Finals by an inferior Detroit Pistons bunch.

Folks also can stop rolling their eyes (you know, just a little) over the slew of megastars on those Dallas Cowboys teams who did nothing worth mentioning after The Triplets of Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin dominated the NFL during parts of the 1990s.

The New York Yankees of the 1980s? The ones without World Series trophies during the era of Dave Winfield, the slugger George Steinbrenner called Mr. May, as opposed to Reggie Jackson of Mr. October fame?

Fughetaboutit.

Meet the new Nets.

They’ll resemble the old Nets.

Which isn’t good, by the way.