Book: Knicks desperately tried to stop Kevin Durant from joining Nets

Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty ImagesIn his new book, “Can’t Knock the Hustle: Inside the Season of Protest, Pandemic, and Progress with the Brooklyn Nets’ Superstars of Tomorrow,” Matt Sullivan writes about how the Knicks went to extremes to keep Kevin Durant from joining the Nets, going as far as trying to convince KD’s father that the Garden was where he should play.

Despite the revisionist history that James Dolan didn’t want to pay Durant the max after his ruptured Achilles, Sullivan lays out just how panicked the Knicks brass were in mid-June 2019, setting up a video conference between Wayne Pratt and New York’s top executives, Steve Mills and Scott Perry. In the book and…