Kevin Durant requested a trade from the Brooklyn Nets on June 30th, but after several weeks of trade rumors, it was announced he would remain with the franchise. While there were reports of trade calls and interest, no deal appeared to get anywhere close to being consummated.
Ethan Strauss of Substack reports that the Nets were never serious about fulfilling Durant’s trade request. The framing of Durant’s value in the media went from “one of the most valuable trade assets ever on the market” to relatively limited in value.
“According to NBA insiders, Brooklyn’s effort to deal KD was largely fake,” writes Strauss. “Sure there were a few legitimate calls at the very beginning, when Durant made his ask. After that point, though, the trade discussions were mostly a façade, conducted simply to suggest the effort.
“As one GM put it to me, ‘There’s a difference between making a call and trying to build a trade. Brooklyn wasn’t trying to build a trade.'”
The Nets are believed to have gone through the motions of considering a trade merely “to to temporarily placate an audience of one, in hopes of getting him to accept that which he finds unacceptable.”
Brooklyn discovered when fielding trade offers that there was less interest in completely gutting their team for Durant than they expected, largely due to his age and the fact that he was trying to leave his team for the third time since 2016.
“This is based on conversations with multiple NBA GMs: The running belief in league circles is that the Nets wanted to present Durant with the false reality that they were actively trying to trade him, as per his wishes, as a precursor to cajoling him back into being a committed Net,” writes Strauss.
