Philadelphia 76ers guard James Harden is not one to speak for long periods of time as he likes to get straight to the point. On Friday, Harden was asked about his time with the Brooklyn Nets since he is going to face his former team in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Playoffs on Saturday.
Harden spent parts of two seasons in Brooklyn after the Houston Rockets traded him to the Nets in January of 2021. Once Harden got to Brooklyn to team up with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, the Nets were billed as a superteam and arguably the greatest offensive trio in the history of the NBA.
However, once Brooklyn lost to the Milwaukee Bucks in the 2021 Playoffs in seven games, all that ensued after that was drama. There were rumors that Harden had checked out on Brooklyn because of Irving and the Nets ownership and those rumors appeared to be true once Harden was traded to the 76ers in February of 2022. While Harden took the brunt of the blame for the eventual failure of the superstar trio, he gave his short take on the situation to reporters after practice on Friday:
“I don’t really wanna go into that, but there were a lot of internal things going on. It was one of the reasons why I made my decision and everybody talked down on me and gave me negative feedback or whatever you wanna call it, but now, fast forward to today, nobody’s saying like ‘Oh, James was smart’ or ‘James knew what he was doing. I don’t want credit, but I’m happy where they (the Nets) are now. Best of luck to those guys and Joe Tsai (Nets’ owner) and that organization. They turned what they had into something really good. They’re in the playoffs and nothing but great talk about those guys in the organization.”
Ky Carlin of Sixers Wire contributed to this story.
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