NBA Rumors: James Harden didn't want to be around Kyrie Irving

The Brooklyn Nets‘ Big 3 is no more, at least not in the way they originally intended it to. James Harden will play for his third team in two seasons and Ben Simmons will finally be on the court again.

But even if the Nets may have ended on the winning side of the trade, some of their issues haven’t changed at all. For starters, Kyrie Irving is still ineligible to play home games, including the playoffs.

Irving’s reluctance to get the vaccine and his overall ‘different’ attitude may have drivenHarden away from Brooklyn. According to Joe Vardon of The Athletic, the two weren’t exactly comfortable with each other.

James Harden And Kyrie Irving Didn’t Get Along That Well

(Transcript via The Athletic)

“The Nets were in Cleveland Jan. 17. In their locker room before the game, Kyrie Irving lit ablaze some sage — a Native American ritual Irving has embraced to cleanse negative energy. Irving doesn’t do this before every game, but he apparently still feels haunted by parts of his past on the Cavs. So he lit his torch.

Harden, according to sources who were in the room when it happened, was seated in front of his locker, watching Irving, and looked at Kyrie like he had three heads.

Definitely a weird vibe between them,” one source said. “You could tell Harden was annoyed, and Kyrie wasn’t feeling James.”

In two seasons, Harden has quit on two teams until they traded him. When he tries to explain this one, my guess is he will not come out and say, explicitly, that he wanted to be as far away from Kyrie as possible. But make no mistake, Irving had something to do with it.

Harden has said publicly he was frustrated the Nets weren’t playing better. He saw how much the Nets need Irving on the court, all the time, and did the math on how nuts that would be to play home playoff games without Irving, even though Irving isn’t hurt.”

Harden knew Kevin Durant from their days in Oklahoma, so it was easy for him to buy in on the Nets. But Irving has often been deemed as a different kind of person, and that’s not for everybody.

The Nets were 13-3 in the 16 games they were able to share the court. They could’ve built something special together. But, in the end, all the doubters were right to say that their locker room was just a time bomb.