The only way this surprises you, even remotely, is if you believed, to the very end, that Walter White was going to break good after six years of “Breaking Bad” and not die defiantly in a hail of bullets. That’s how inevitable what happened Friday in Brooklyn was.
You put your chips behind Kyrie Irving at your own risk, your own peril. Maybe you believe you will be the one to placate him, to please him, but there is always something else. Cleveland felt that way once. Boston, too. Those cities, those fans of the Cavaliers and Celtics tried to warn you:
Don’t be hypnotized by the talent.
Don’t be mesmerized by the skill.
The Nets are learning that lesson now, again, for the umpteenth time since handing Irving the keys to the car 3 1/2 years ago. Now he wants to be traded, and of course the demand by itself is as hollow as the one Kevin Durant issued, and then retracted, last summer and fall.
The Nets can comply and admit, finally, the futility of harboring hopes of a parade down Flatbush Avenue that will never happen. Or they can lose Irving for nothing this summer, which is the one part of this threat he can actually go through with on his own once his contract expires.
At this point, the Nets have to be weary of the games and the mind-fornications Irving specializes in. They sure ought to be. The Nets — and their most devoted fans — waiting for Irving to become a fully all-in member of the organization are like Kay Adams in “The Godfather,” waiting for years for the Corleone Family to go strictly legitimate.
It’s never going to happen.
So the Nets have an easy decision here: simply do what they’ve done from the moment they welcomed Irving to town on July 1, 2019.
Capitulate. Give him what he wants. They have fired two coaches to mollify him. They have molded their roster time and again to pacify his restless whims. They folded in the face of their tough-guy stance to keep him away from the team’s road games last year. They decided that, after 15 hard minutes of reflection this year, he’d changed his attitude toward Jews.
They’ve allowed Irving to play them for fools long enough, so it is right to offer one final term of surrender. Trade him. Get what you can for him. Let him be someone else’s problem. If LeBron James truly has developed amnesia for how Irving divorced him a few years ago in Cleveland, fracturing a championship tandem, let LeBron greet him at LAX and fit him for a Lakers uniform. There is always someone willing to take a chance on talent. Find them. Make the deal.
End the charade, once and for all.
It is actually quintessential Kyrie to bail on the Nets now, in the wake of their most humiliating defeat of the season, a 139-96 loss to the Celtics in Boston on Wednesday night, during which they trailed at one point by 49. That has been Irving’s M.O., all across his career: Find a bad situation and make it even worse. He should trademark the move by now.
Forget the fact there was a brief, shining moment this season, before Durant went down with a bum knee, when the Nets won 12 games in a row and 18 out of 20 and actually looked, legitimately, like the kind of team that could be hell on any Eastern Conference foe come spring. Coach Jacque Vaughn had somehow figured out how to make the Nets’ ill-fitting pieces mesh and blend. Irving and Durant played at All-Star levels; they are All-Star starters.
Now? The Nets can call Irving’s bluff as they did Durant’s and keep him, but it’s not nearly the same. Durant was signed for the long term when he demanded a trade; Irving’s deal will expire when the season does. And if you think Irving is capricious and unreliable in tranquil times — and he is — what, exactly, would Full-Blown Unhappy Kyrie be like?
It’s easy, really. For 3 1/2 years, every time Kyrie has said, “Jump!” the men who run the Nets immediately reply, “How high?” All that’s changed now is the verbiage.
“Trade me!” Irving yelled.
“Happily,” should be the reply.