Kevin Durant backs a former Nets star to be added to the Hall of Fame.
Nets superstar Kevin Durant, a surefire Hall of Famer whenever he retires, is backing another former Nets star to join him in Springfield – though it doesn’t seem likely to happen.
Durant responded to a tweet asking people to name a player who should be in the Hall of Fame, and shared a photo of two-time NBA All-Star Stephon Marbury.
Marbury played 13 seasons in the NBA, including two full years in New Jersey after being traded from the Timberwolves in 1999. For his career, Marbury averaged 19.3 points and 7.6 assists per game. He then went on to have a very successful career in China, where he won three CBA titles with the Beijing Ducks.
Per Basketball Reference, Marbury has a Hall of Fame percentage of just 7 percent, ranking him behind more than 190 other players.
On this day in Celtics history, Boston signed Stephon Marbury, and saw Bob Cousy dish 28 assists in a 173-point win over the Lakers.
On this day in Boston Celtics history, the Celtics signed star point guard Stephon Marbury as an unrestricted free agent in 2009. The New York native decided to sign with the Celtics after he was bought out by the New York Knicks in the wake of a falling out with the then-head coach of the Knicks, Mike D’Antoni.
The Marbury era in Boston was a brief one, however. The former Georgia Tech standout finished one of the worst seasons of his NBA career wearing the green and white. His play dropped significantly across most counting stats.
Marbury averaged 3.8 points and 3.3 assists in 23 regular-season games with the Celtics in 2008-09, compared to his career rates of 19.3 points and 7.6 assists per game. He played in 14 postseason games that season; Boston lost its second-round series to Orlando in seven games.
Former NBA star Stephon Marbury assesses Kevin Durant.
The Brooklyn Nets are in wonderland right now. They have arguably the best player in the world in Kevin Durant. They have arguably the best player at drawing fouls the game has ever seen in James Harden. They even have arguably the best player to ever handle the ball in Kyrie Irving. With these three leading the ship, it has attracted some of the game’s greats such as LaMarcus Aldridge and Blake Griffin to come to Brooklyn.
Former Nets star Stephon Marbury recently chimed in on what the Nets have going on. Well, particularly Kevin Durant. On his way to averaging 23 PPG 8.1 APG and 3.1 RPG in 172 games, Marbury secured an All-Star appearance with the Nets in 2001. When the former guard appeared on the “Ball Don’t Stop” podcast he said, “Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan are the two best ever, but I’ve never seen anything like Kevin Durant.” His praise for Durant did not end there though:
“I remember watching Kevin Durant, his first game in college when he was with Texas. I called my brother and I was like, ‘yo, is this kid named Kevin Durant?’ So he’s a freshman. I said he would not be there. He won’t be there long. He’s crazy. I was like, ‘yo this is sick.’ So from then on, it’s basically been, it’s been the same movement. It’s just been, you know, better. We’ve never seen a guy at 6’10” handle the ball the way how he handles the basketball. I mean, it’s literally point guard skills and everything that he does from his cross from his, you know, his hesi everything you know, but the thing the thing that separates is he can shoot.
“Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan are the two best ever, but I’ve never seen anything like Kevin Durant”
The Brooklyn Nets were clicking on all cylinders once Sunday, making fairly easy work of the Golden State Warriors.
Oddly enough, Kevin Durant’s two performances against the Golden State Warriors have been among his lowest-scoring games of the 2020-21 season. He scored 22 in Brooklyn’s opening night win, and finished with 20 in the Nets’ trip to California on Saturday. But, in both instances, the Nets have won — most recently by a score of 134-117. Kyrie Irving led the Nets this time around with 23 points and James Harden had 19.
So, how did the Nets manage to put up 134 points when their big three only accounted for 62 of them? With the exception of Noah Vonleh in his three minutes of action, every Net who took the floor scored at least eight points, with Jeff Green leading Saturday’s reserves with 14.
As for Brooklyn’s other two starters, Joe Harris had 15 points and Bruce Brown went off for 18 — making Saturday’ win over the Warriors the first time all five Nets starters scored 15-plus points in a regulation game since April 16, 1999, per ESPN.
The Starting lineup from that game: Stephon Marbury, Kendall Gill, Scott Burrell, Keith Van Horn and Jamie Feick.
James Harden looked for his offense early against the Atlanta Hawks and wound up doing something no Net has since Stephon Marbury.
Kevin Durant led the Nets with 32 points in their 132-128 overtime win against the Atlanta Hawks on Wednesday, but it was James Harden who truly went off for Brooklyn. The guard scored 31 points on 9-for-20 shooting, drilling five of his nine 3-point attempts, while dishing out 15 assists and grabbing eight rebounds in 46 minutes of action.
By reaching both the 30-point and 15-assist mark in the win against Atlanta, Harden became the first player in franchise history to reach those marks in the same game since Stephon Marbury scored 34 points and dished out 15 assists for New Jersey in a 122-120 win over the Detroit Pistons on January 20, 2000.
But Harden’s rebound total separated him from Marbury — along with every other player to ever wear a Nets uniform. On Wednesday, Harden became the first Nets player to ever record 30-plus points, eight-plus rebounds and 15-plus assists in a game.
Caris LeVert did his best to lead the Nets to another win, but Brooklyn could not knock off the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday.
The Brooklyn Nets survived the Utah Jazz without Kevin Durant and the Philadelphia 76ers without both the forward and Kyrie Irving, but they’ve been unable to figure out the Memphis Grizzlies, losing to them for the second time in as many weeks on Friday.
While all of the Nets started off slowly in their 115-110 loss to the Grizzlies, one player above the rest caught fire as the game went along. Caris LeVert finished the game with 43 points and six assists to his name in 36 minutes of action, knocking down a career-high seven 3-pointers on nine attempts.
“I was due,” LeVert said on a Zoom call with reporters after Friday’s loss. “I’ve been shooting bad all season, so I felt like I was due for this game. I [have] been putting in a lot of work. My shot feels good, so I think it was just a matter of time.”
LeVert’s 43 points are the most scored by a Nets player in a game against the Grizzlies throughout 49 all-time matchups between the franchises. Stephon Marbury held the record until Friday, having scored 42 points for New Jersey back in 2000 against the then-Vancouver Grizzlies.
The Brooklyn Nets will be without Spencer Dinwiddie for an extended period of time, if not ll of 2020-21.
Spencer Dinwiddie may try to return from ACL surgery sooner than the average individual, but the Nets are going to be without him for a long time either way. There are players on the roster who can help make up for his absence, but Brooklyn will likely have the option to apply for a Disabled Player Exception if Dinwiddie is, in fact, done for 2020-21 — and two former Nets stars already know who they want their old team to add.
“I think if Jamal is in the physical shape to play 15-20 minutes at a high level, why not give him a chance,” Stephon Marbury told Brandon “Scoop B Robinson of Heavy.com. “He’s perfect for the system in how they play. Run him through a high-level NBA workout for three to five days to see how his body recovers and let that be the tester.”
Now, if the Nets were to apply for a Disabled Player Exception, they’d need to cut someone from the current roster.
“Let [LeVert] have the second unit as the feature guy,” Carter said. “And, of course, sometimes you can play the three of them together. But I think, keep it this way, go get somebody who can get you a bucket or a ball-handler — like a Jamal Crawford or someone who can score, get buckets and be a ball-handler.”
Former Nets point guard Stephon Marbury heard from some critics in his day, and he doesn’t care for what some have said about Kyrie Irving.
Former New Jersey Nets point guard Stephon Marbury has flat-out had it with Kyrie Irving’s critics.
Accompanying a highlight of Irving from his Cleveland Cavaliers, Marbury wrote a lengthy caption on Instagram in defense of Irving:
There’s always someone pushing a narrative to the public about Black men who have a voice[,] respect and the ability to make millions or billions of dollars. It seems the threat will always be real no matter the time period in life. Kyrie is one of the realist humans on the earth let alone one of the coldest point guards to ever play the game of basketball with more time to wine and dine us. Because his mind sees differently than the crowd of people that speak frequently he’s a problem. He’s done things on the court we’ve never seen before. He’s a champion and if he never wins another championship he did more than a lot of people in his short time while living. If people stopped in the moment payed [sic] attention to the people pushing the narrative that he’s a problem it’s only because they can’t solve him. Take a look at most of the people writing ✍️ about him and you’ll get your answer. It’s a gang of them and their built to tear down the culture assassinate your character your game while defaming your fame. These people who write my name parents wrote my name in vain and if it wasn’t their parents it was their grandparents. It’s all so familiar looking like how I look but it’s their book, we just keep them shook! #starburytalk
https://www.instagram.com/p/CHA3KUcpELw/
This isn’t the first time Marbury has praised Irving. Back in August, Marbury said of Irving:
He’s a real one. He’s a guy that not only can get on the basketball court and perform, but off the court he has an opinion and as a human being he has a feeling which is in tune with what is actually happening with other human beings. So when he speaks and he says something, he doesn’t just speak it and say things just because he’s talking. He’s speaking and talking because he can feel the vibration of what’s actually happening and what’s actually going on in the universe and what’s happening with our people.
Former New Jersey Nets guard Stephon Marbury recently had a lot to say about rapper and former Brooklyn Nets owner Jay-Z.
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NBA players’ names get thrown around in rap songs all the time. Usually, it’s a good thing when that happens.
But every once in a while, it’s not — like when Jay-Z mentioned former New Jersey Nets guard Stephon Marbury in his song “La-La-La (Excuse Me Miss Again),” which was part of the Bad Boys II soundtrack:
Don’t confuse me with Marbury out this [expletive]
Run up on me at the light, you could lose your life
While with the Nets in 2000, Marbury was robbed of a 24-inch diamond necklace worth $150,000 in Manhattan, after leaving a nightclub, by two men, the police told the New York Times after the incident.
Jay-Z’s reference to the robbery wasn’t the start of the beef between the two, Marbury recently told Brandon “Scoop B” Robinson of Heavy.com. But, the lyrics certainly didn’t quiet down the situation.
The ex-Nets guard has spoken about the former Brooklyn Nets minority owner in the past, but Marbury laid into Jay-Z even more during his recent discussion with Robinson:
I look at Jay-Z and I say, ‘Wow, here you are trying to be something that you’re not. You’re not an advocate for Black people, you sold drugs to Black people and you rapped about it and talked about it.’ How do you do that? Like, I’m trying to figure that part out; like, you can’t make that right. This ain’t snitching, this ain’t telling on nobody, you told on yourself already. You already told people what it is that you do and how you do it and how you feel about what you’re doing. So, how are you rapping about something that you did? I’m confused. I dunno. But, people ask me, ‘Why you always talking about Jay-Z? Why you always say something about LeBron?’ — they’re two of the same. They [are] together. They [are] friends.
Marbury continued:
You sold drugs to people where you [are] from Jay-Z in Brooklyn in Marcy. You got them on crack — whatever it is cocaine whatever it is that you were selling to them. Whatever you say you [were] ‘cooking up,’ that’s what you did. So now, you got your people high, you sold drugs to women that were pregnant. Now you created crack babies — these same babies that are going out killing grandparents … I’m confused. But that’s what it is. That’s what happened.
Ex-Celtic guard Stephon Marbury spoke about the roots of his feud with rapper Jay-Z in a recent interview.
Hip hop has been a part of the overall cultural package of the NBA almost as long as the genre has been around, but that doesn’t always mean the relationship has been a smooth one.
And the tension between former Boston Celtic guard Stephon Marbury and rapper Jay-Z is one of the more high-profile examples of how the pairing has been occasionally fraught where elsewhere it has fit hand-in-glove.
Both Marbury and Shawn Corey Carter — Jay-Z’s real name — hail from Brooklyn, New York, but it isn’t a turf battle that led to the two falling out years ago.
The first blow was thrown by Carter, who, in a song entitled “La-La-La (Excuse Me Miss Again),” took a shot at the former Celtic in his lyrics.
“Pink diamond necklace, strawberry wrist/Please excuse yourself, you’re very sick/Don’t confuse me with Marbury out this [expletive]/Run up on me at the light, you could lose your life.”
The lyrics were likely a reference to a robbery of the NBAer at a traffic light that saw Marbury lose a necklace and diamond studs worth $150,000 in 2000 while he was with the (then) New Jersey (now Brooklyn) Nets, according to the New York Post’s Larry Celona.
“I look at Jay-Z and I say, ‘Wow, here you are trying to be something that you’re not,'” offered Marbury.
“You’re not an advocate for Black people, you sold drugs to Black people and you rapped about it and talked about it,” he continued. “How do you do that? Like, I’m trying to figure that part out; like, you can’t make that right. This ain’t snitching, this ain’t telling on nobody, you told on yourself already. You already told people what it is that you do and how you do it and how you feel about what you’re doing. So, how are you rapping about something that you did?”
“I’m confused,” Marbury added.
After a ‘[expletive] disgrace’ at Game 3’s end, Celts ready for Game 4 https://t.co/DTjLir0JIa
Critical of his past as an unapologetic dealer of crack cocaine, Marbury is no fan of the rapper, who reportedly originally fell out with Carter over a woman many years ago, the rapper jealous their mutual friend decided to dance with Marbury at a club.
Whether or not the billionaire musical artist ever cares to tell more about his side of the story — whether in interview or lyrical format — remains to be seen.
But we shouldn’t expect to be seeing the duo out dancing at the club any time soon based on what we’re hearing from Marbury.
