Moments after dropping 53 points to help his Brooklyn Nets hold off the cross-town rival Knicks on Sunday afternoon, Kevin Durant had a direct message to NYC Mayor Eric Adams:
“Yo, Eric, you gotta figure something out, man, because it’s looking crazy.”
What Durant wants Adams to figure out is something regarding New York City’s vaccination policy, which now allows Kyrie Irving to attend events at Barclays Center, but not actually play home games for the Nets.
That oddity was on full display on Sunday afternoon when Irving, who bought some courtside seats for the Nets-Knicks game, entered Barclays Center for the first time this year with a small group.
"It's ridiculous. I don't understand it at all,” Durant said of the situation. “There's a few people in our arena that's unvaxxed, right? They lifted all of that in our arena, right? So I don't get it. It just feels like at this point now, somebody's trying to make a statement or a point to flex their authority. Everybody out here is looking for attention and that's what I feel like the mayor wants right now, is some attention. But he'll figure it out soon, he better.”
The Nets needed all of KD’s 53 on Sunday, pulling out a 110-107 victory in a game that was tied as late as 103-103 with a minute left, before Durant scored the Nets’ last seven points on a triple and four free throws.
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Fellow forwards Andre Drummond and Bruce Brown had 33 of the Nets’ other 57, but they could’ve used Irving in a game where the starting backcourt of Goran Dragic and Patty Mills scored 13 collectively and Seth Curry sat out due to a balky ankle.
Kyrie was there, just in street clothes, walking into Barclays out of the visiting team's tunnel and towards his seat late in the first quarter. That entrance caught KD by surprise, and drew some cheers and a chant of “Free Kyrie!” from some of the fans in attendance.
“I was at the free throw line I think when he walked in, and me and [Andre Drummond] looked at each other and was like, 'Yo, this is unreal,’" Durant said. "I've never seen nothing like this before. We just smiled. We could say that about a lot of situations over these last two or three years when things just didn't make any sense, especially with COVID being involved.
So hopefully it gets figured out.”
The kicker for KD, and many others, is that unvaccinated players from other teams can play at Barclays or MSG, but because Irving is technically a New York employee, he falls under the city’s mandate preventing unvaccinated individuals from working.
“It just didn't make any sense. There's unvaxxed people in this building already. We got a guy who can come in the building, I guess, are they fearing our safety? I don't get it. We're all confused. Pretty much everybody in the world is confused at this point. Early on in the season people didn't understand what was going on, but now it just looks stupid. Especially on national TV, and he can come to the game, but not play? Come on, man. So hopefully, Eric, you got to figure this out."
Irving also joined the Nets in the locker room at halftime, according to head coach Steve Nash, who also doesn’t understand why his star point guard can be in the stands and even the locker room, but not on the bench or on the court.
“It doesn't really affect us," Nash said of Sunday’s scene. “We're used to stuff like that. We just tried to stay focused and win the game and we know there's the oddities to everything but we're locked in on the task at hand."
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