If you can feel sorry for a guy getting paid $19 million a year to play basketball, you can feel sorry for Joe Harris, UVA alum and guard with the Brooklyn Nets, the backed-up truck-stop toilet of the NBA.
When Harris signed his extension with the Nets in 2020, it was the best of all possible worlds, or so it seemed – getting big money to play in New York, the world capital of the game of basketball, on a superteam with top stars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.
Harris, a three-point marksman, was going to have one of the better jobs in the NBA, asked only to play tight defense and hit open threes opposite Durant and Irving, two of the league’s best at getting open shots for teammates with their ability to draw extra attention from opposing defenses.
And that was before the franchise traded for James Harden, one of the handful of guys who can give Durant and Irving a run for their money as a ball-dominant guard.
The first season as a superteam came to a surprisingly quick end, in the Eastern Conference semifinals, but the future seemed to foretell at least one title run.
You wouldn’t have known it then, but the seven-game setback to Milwaukee in the spring of 2021 would be the high-water mark for the group.
Irving, who somehow got admitted into Duke despite also being the kind of person who thinks it is provocative to insist that the earth is flat, decided that he’s also the kind of person who thought it was provocative to contest New York City rules on COVID, leading to him missing 53 games last season.
Along the way, Harden begged out, forcing a trade to Philadelphia, which gave up Ben Simmons, a former #1 overall pick who missed all of last season to address his mental health, and now that he’s returned, is struggling to address the mental block that prevents him from being able to effectively shoot a basketball, a key part of the game of basketball.
And then there’s more of Irving’s stupid sh-t, the latest generated controversy being his social media endorsement of an anti-Semitic fake news documentary, then doubling down on the matter when pressed on the matter by an ESPN reporter.
Irving is no doubt happy with the latest bit of chaos that he has sowed, which led a group of Nets fans with front-row tickets next to the Nets bench wearing “Fight Antisemitism” T-shirts, because he’s just that type of guy, the type being a–hole.
We’re only seven games into the 2022-2023 season, and already head coach Steve Nash has begged out, stepping down today in what the coach and team called a mutually agreed to parting of the ways.
If it’s possible, this story gets still darker.
The team is negotiating the return of former Nets assistant Ime Udoka, who led the Boston Celtics to the NBA Finals last year, before being forced to the sidelines with a one-year suspension after the Cs front office determined, following a lengthy investigation, that Udoka had engaged in an inappropriate sexual relationship with a staffer.
So, you’ve got a new coach coming in that his former team couldn’t wait to let be somebody else’s problem, a point guard doubling down on anti-Semitism, a former #1 pick who either doesn’t play or, when he does play, stinks, and that’s not even accounting for Durant, who spent the summer demanding that the Nets either fire Nash and GM Sean Marks or trade him.
In the midst of this, you have Joe Harris, nice kid from Washington State, played for nice guy Tony Bennett for four years, from everything I know loves living in Brooklyn.
He’s making good money, and that’s a good thing, because he’s going to need to be able to use some of it to treat the PTSD that is to come for him.
Harris is under contract through 2023-2024, incidentally, so, 75 games left this season, and then a whole ‘nuther year of this nonsense.
Poor guy.
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Chris Graham
