NEW YORK — The Brooklyn Nets welcomed Kevin Durant and the Phoenix Suns to Barclays Center on Wednesday and lost 136-120.
For the Nets, Cam Thomas had 25 points and four assists while Mikal Bridges had 21 points and three rebounds. Cam Johnson had 18 points and Spencer Dinwiddie had 16 points.
For the Suns, Kevin Durant had 33 points and eight assists while Jusuf Nurkic had 28 points and 11 rebounds. Devin Booker had 22 points and Eric Gordon had 17 points.
In the first half, both teams played each other to a standstill essentially as neither team could stop the other from scoring at will. Without Ben Simmons, Dorian Finney-Smith, and Day’Ron Sharpe for this game, Brooklyn had quite the issue matching up against Durant (16 points) and Jusuf Nurkic (17 points).
In the second half, this game got out of hand in the third quarter as the Suns put on quite the run by winning the period 42-26 thanks to the dominance of Durant and Nurkic. The Nets were able to play the Suns evenly in the fourth quarter, but when you’re down almost 20 points, you have to create some edges and Brooklyn wasn’t able to make a dent in the huge deficit.
Here are your Nets player grades following Wednesday’s loss: