A trade that would return Kevin Durant to the Bay Area has been discussed between the Golden State Warriors and the Brooklyn Nets, but there are several obstacles in the way.
First, there are a handful of young players the Nets want in any deal as well as 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 edition of the “Lowe Post” podcast. 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 pieces.
“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.”
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 team. However, it is going to take a substantial package of players and picks to make this deal happen.
“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.”
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The Warriors are coming off an NBA Finals win and will still be at the top of the league with the talent they have remaining to make yet another run.
Giving up so much for Kevin Durant to come back may not be worth it, no matter how good he is.
