Getty Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry celebrate during Game 2 of the 2018 NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The Golden State Warriors and the Brooklyn Nets have discussed a trade that would send Kevin Durant back to the Bay Area, but multiple roadblocks exist.
First, there are a handful of young players the Nets want in any deal who the Dubs aren’t yet ready to part with. Second, there are a couple of premier performers Golden State might be willing to ship to Brooklyn who the Nets have dismissed as inadequate “centerpieces” in a hypothetical Durant trade.
Zach Lowe and Kendra Andrews of ESPN took a deep dive into the Durant discussions between the Warriors and Nets as part of the Friday, July 22, edition of the “Lowe Post” podcast. During their conversation, Lowe revealed that his sources within the Nets organization made clear that the franchise has serious misgivings about both Jordan Poole and Andrew Wiggins as the primary win-now pieces they would be likely receive in return for shipping Durant back to his old team.
“The intel I have is that the Nets are not super high on Wiggins or Poole as sort of centerpiece players,” Lowe explained. “Then you get to the other guys who are relatively unproven in the NBA. So I don’t know if there ever really was a deal there that the Nets would have done. Obviously, you have to explore it if you’re the Warriors.”
Of the two, Poole would probably be considered more of a prize to most teams at 23 years old and heading into just his second contract after next season, as opposed to the 27-year-old Wiggins who will be seeking his third payday at the same time and will earn considerably more than Poole during the upcoming year.
Wiggins is essentially a necessity in any deal the Warriors could make for Durant, however, considering the team would need his $33.6 million salary in 2022-23 to make the financials match up.
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Warriors Not Interested in Mortgaging Entire Future For Durant
Getty ImagesAndrew Wiggins (left) and Jordan Poole (right) of the Golden State Warriors.
Andrews, who covers the Warriors for ESPN, added that her sources inside that organization said the team was not interested in selling off all of its young talent to reunite Durant with the likes of Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green — a cast that looked invincible when healthy, as they carried Golden State to three straight NBA Finals appearances and won back-to-back titles in 2017 and 2018.
Where it kinda got … not really serious with the Warriors, they weren’t really willing to give up all of the pieces that they would have been required to give up in order to get Kevin Durant.
That’s every single one of their young pieces: James Wiseman, Jordan Poole, Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody, Andrew Wiggins is gonna have to go, future draft picks are gonna have to go — that is everything.
And as we just talked about, those guys are players who — especially when they lost Gary Payton II and Otto Porter Jr. — those are players who became even more important not just in their future, but in their present.
Warriors’ GM Bob Myers Appears to Close Door on Durant Deal
Getty(Left to right) Andre Iguodala, Klay Thompson, Stephen Curry and Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors celebrate after defeating the Cleveland Cavaliers during Game 4 of the 2018 NBA Finals at Quicken Loans Arena on June 8, 2018 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images)
The personnel obstacles to making a trade for Durant on both the Warriors’ and Nets’ sides of the equation render an agreement unlikely.
And if the hard evidence wasn’t enough, Golden State general manager Bob Myers spoke in thinly-veiled language to the unlikelihood of trading for Durant while at the ESPY’s last week, which was hosted by Curry and aired on Wednesday, July 20.
“I like our team and where it’s at. I want to give the guys a chance to do it again,” Myers told Mark Medina of NBA.com. “It’s a good group. We’re lucky. It’ll be fun to see. We were really hunting last year. Now I guess we’re back to being the hunted, which I didn’t think we’d be. We’ll see. I think we can handle it.”