Kevin Durant never delivered a championship to Brooklyn, but the move that brought him there still stands as the most transformative free-agent signing the Nets have ever made.
That’s the case Bleacher Report made in a recent roundup of every NBA team’s top free-agent pickup, and it’s tough to push back. The Nets have had stars.
They’ve had talent. What they haven’t had often is a player who actually picked them in free agency, which is what made the summer of 2019 so huge for the franchise.
For the first time, Brooklyn looked like a destination, and Durant and Kyrie Irving both said yes.
Durant’s arrival carried extra weight because of the moment he was in. He was coming off back-to-back Finals MVPs with the Golden State Warriors and was recovering from the Achilles injury he suffered in the NBA Finals.
Plenty of teams would have hesitated before handing out a max deal under those circumstances. Brooklyn didn’t.
Once he finally got back on the court after missing the entire 2019-20 season, Durant was exactly what the Nets had hoped for. Over three seasons in Brooklyn, he put up 29.0 points, 7.4 rebounds and 5.8 assists per game while shooting with the kind of efficiency that has defined his career.
At times, he looked like the best player in basketball. At all times when healthy, he gave the Nets a real championship ceiling.
The clearest proof came in the 2021 playoffs.
With Kyrie Irving out because of an ankle injury and James Harden limited by a hamstring strain, Durant nearly carried Brooklyn past the eventual champion Milwaukee Bucks by himself. He averaged 34.3 points, 9.3 rebounds and 4.4 assists in the postseason, and the run included one of the best playoff performances the franchise has ever seen.
Game 5, when Durant went for 49 points and a triple-double, already sits near the top of the Nets’ postseason memory bank. Then came Game 7, when he poured in 48 points and appeared to have won it at the buzzer, only for replay to show his foot was just barely on the three-point line. The game went to overtime, and Milwaukee survived.
That one shoe size kept Brooklyn from a moment that could have altered NBA history.
Durant isn’t the only free-agent signing with a case, though.
Irving deserves mention after joining him in 2019. His Brooklyn run was messy, marked by injuries and off-court issues, but the production was undeniable when he played. He averaged nearly 27 points per game and teamed with Durant to form one of the league’s most dangerous offensive pairings.
There are other names worth bringing up, too. Patty Mills brought shooting and professionalism during the 2021-22 season.
Armen Gilliam had three solid seasons after signing with New Jersey in the early 1990s. Todd MacCulloch helped the Nets reach their first NBA Finals in 2002.
And Andray Blatche became one of the better bench scorers in the league after arriving in Brooklyn.
Still, none of them shifted the franchise’s trajectory like Durant did.
His decision changed the way the league viewed Brooklyn. National TV became routine.
Talk of rebuilding gave way to championship expectations. The Nets stopped chasing stars and started landing them.
The ending wasn’t clean. Injuries, bad luck and roster instability kept the Durant-Irving-Harden trio from ever fully taking off, and the three of them played only 16 games together.
That “what if?” remains one of the biggest in recent NBA memory.
But the ending doesn’t erase the impact.
Durant gave Brooklyn its highest ceiling, produced some of the greatest individual games in franchise history and came within inches of pushing the Nets into the Eastern Conference Finals. Even without a title, his free-agent signing still towers above the rest in franchise history.
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