NEW YORK — You’d expect a team featuring Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and Ben Simmons — three players who’ve made All-NBA teams over the past two seasons — to demand strong, stirring adjectives to describe their play, their swagger, the way they lord over the court. Words like commanding. Dominant. Confident.
Here, instead, are some of the words those three stars and head coach Steve Nash used to describe the Nets’ opening-night outing against the visiting Pelicans:
Rattled. Clunky. Tense. Antsy.
Those weren’t the harshest words they could’ve chosen to depict the largely listless performance that the Nets turned in Wednesday, in a game that saw a healthy Zion Williamson lead the Pelicans into Barclays Center and batter Brooklyn from pillar to post, from the opening tip to the final buzzer of a 130-108 blowout.