Philadelphia 76ers guard James Harden played 80 games for the Brooklyn Nets at a time when the team was expected to compete for a championship. When Brooklyn acquired Harden in January of 2021, with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving already on the team, it was looked at as the most dangerous team in the history of the NBA. However, it did not end that way as Harden was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers in February of 2022 and he received a lot of criticism for wanting out.
“Frustrating,” Harden said when asked to sum up his time with Durant and Irving. “There’s a lot of what-ifs. I think we only played less than 20 games together so it was a little bit frustrating, but it is what it is. Hopefully, everybody’s in a good place now and we can move on.”
Since Harden was the first to want out of Brooklyn along with his prior history of his less-than-ideal way of getting away from the Houston Rockets, he received a lot of flack from everyone about his inability to stay the course and being a bad teammate.
“Yeah, there was a lot of things,” Harden said when asked if there was anything Brooklyn could’ve done to make him want to say. “A lot of dysfunction, clearly. There was a lot of internal things, I’m not gonna just put in the media or anything and that was one of the reasons why I chose to make my decisions. Now, fast forward to today, I don’t look like the crazy one. I don’t look like the quitter or whatever the media wanna call me. I knew what was going on and I just decided I’m not built for this. I don’t wanna deal with that. I wanna play basketball and have fun and enjoy doing it. Fast forward to today, they got a whole new roster.”
Harden, who had 29 points and six assists in Saturday’s 101-98 win over the Nets, has not spoken about his time in Brooklyn in this much detail until now. Now that Irving and Durant are out of Brooklyn, it looks like the organization is to blame.
Ky Carlin of Sixers Wire contributed to this story.
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