Dallas Mavericks star Kyrie Irving has played for multiple franchises throughout his NBA career, but one of his most complicated stints came with the Brooklyn Nets. Teaming up with Kevin Durant in one of the league’s biggest markets came with enormous expectations — and now, Irving is opening up about what really happened during his time in Brooklyn.
Irving spoke candidly about the team’s chemistry struggles, especially when it came to Steve Nash’s appointment as head coach. According to the NBA All-Star guard, neither he nor Nash were fully on board with the partnership from the beginning, despite media narratives suggesting otherwise.
“How Steve ended up becoming our head coach, I’ll let K [Kevin Durant] answer that when he’s ready,” Irving said. “But I already had my own thoughts on how the coaching situation was gonna go.”
Irving admitted he had other candidates in mind — ones with more experience as head coaches. While he acknowledged Nash brought a winning mindset from his time with the Golden State Warriors, Irving made it clear he wasn’t thrilled about the hire or the challenges that followed.
“We had already hashed that out, but I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like, yeah, it was all easy around everything in Brooklyn,” Irving said. “We’re in New York City, the media capital of the world — you just gotta walk a little bit different. I wasn’t ready to walk that walk, and there was a lot going on, not just in Brooklyn in general, but the Nets.”
Durant and Irving pushed themselves to stay in peak condition and deliver on the promise of building one of the league’s best teams — and they were supposed to do it under Nash’s leadership.
Nash’s coaching tenure resulted in a respectable 94-67 regular season record, but his teams consistently underperformed in the playoffs. The locker room quickly deteriorated, and Nash was eventually replaced by Jacque Vaughn.
While Nash’s playing career was nothing short of legendary — two-time MVP, eight-time All-Star, seven-time All-NBA — his run as head coach in Brooklyn will go down as a cautionary tale, central to one of the NBA’s most infamous failed superteams.