Kevin Durant knows why his Nets experiment failed as Brooklyn picks up the pieces

It was Kevin Durant’s trade request that officially ended the Nets’ most recent window of contention.Now that they’ve finally started a rebuild two years later, Durant has watched from afar and said he can see it heading in the right direction. Durant brought his Suns to Barclays Center on Wednesday, where he’d combined with Kyrie Irving and James Harden to form one of the most potent Big 3’s in NBA history.

But they spectacularly flamed out, winning just a single playoff series in the parts of four seasons Durant and Irving were together. “You see so many fans who still remember those times and appreciate it — even though we went through a lot of dysfunction, I guess you could call it, for lack of a better term.But regardless of that, a lot of people still supported and still came out, cheered loud as hell for the game of basketball and for the Nets,” Durant said.

“It was here in this borough of Brooklyn, the little brother.It was always fun being a little brother and representing the little brother in the city.” Durant famously spurned the big brother, rejected the Knicks to come to Brooklyn as a package deal with Irving in 2019.

They recruited Harden to form a Big 3 that lost to eventual champ Milwaukee in the 2021 Eastern Conference semifinals when both Harden and Irving got hurt. Irving missed two-thirds of the next season for refusing to adhere to the city’s COVID vaccine mandates, and Harden demanded a move at the trade deadline. After Irving did the same at the next year’s deadline, Durant finally asked out.The Big 3 was over after just 16 appearances together, undone by a host of factors. “Injuries, COVID, us just not getting on the court,” Durant said.

“Those two were the biggest factors.People would say our attitudes, three guys’ personalities didn’t mesh well.

[There were] a lot of narratives going around about each individual player — me, James and Kyrie — about our mentality as men.But once we got on th...