Last month, I went to a small exhibition of new photographs by the artist Awol Erizku. The pictures were illuminated by light boxes, so they glowed with a subtle pulse in the darkly painted room where they hung. I was drawn immediately to a picture at the back of the room: an electric-yellow background framing the back of a Black male head. The man’s hair thinned gradually, leaving an island of bare skin toward the crown. He had high, broad shoulders and a short spit of a neck. Around his neck was a gold chain, and on his back was an N.B.A. logo against a black-and-white jersey. It took me a second or two to realize that this was the Brooklyn Nets superstar Kevin Durant, whom Erizku photographed on assignment for the Times Magazine.
By now, he’s about as famous—and, therefore, as compulsively and thoroughly photographed—as an athlete can get, but the Erizku photograph, which totally absents his face, gave me a new way to think about Durant. Something in those shoulders and in the set of the neck, in the sign of unashamed age suggested by the unhidden bald spot, gave an impression of the unflappable calm that comes only by way of long-sustained excellence. Durant has been so good at basketball for so long that it’s never a surprise to see him succeed. Even in losing efforts—as when, last year, his Nets fell to the Milwaukee Bucks in the second round—he has generally delivered a kind of workaday brilliance. In that series against the Bucks, he averaged more than thirty-five points, ten rebounds, and five assists per contest and, in Game Seven, played what might have been the best individual game of his life, notching forty-eight points, nine rebounds, six assists, one steal, and one block in fifty-three minutes, without rest—and hitting a last-second shot that would’ve won the series for Brooklyn had his foot not been a centimetre or two over the three-point line. (Milwaukee went on to win the game in overtime.)
This steadiness—held in and symbolized by those winglike shoulders—is why, for me, it was so unsettling to watch Durant look so wobbly during the Nets’ first-round matchup against the surging Boston Celtics. On Saturday night, I went to Game Three, hoping to see some of the dependable Durantian magic. The Nets were down 2–0 in the series, thanks to a close loss in a beautifully played, magnificently competitive Game One, and also to a pair of lacklustre performances by Durant and his unspeakably more erratic sidekick, Kyrie Irving, in Game Two.
In some ways, this wasn’t, or at least shouldn’t have been, at all startling. Thanks, in part, to Irving—who refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19, and, therefore, until a late-season rule change by Mayor Eric Adams, was ineligible to play in the Nets’ home games—the Nets had relatively few opportunities this season to hone their approach. (The team traded a third star, James Harden, amid reports that he had become frustrated that Irving was playing only part-time.) They were a theoretical super-team, not a fully realized force. And, by many metrics, the Celtics have been the best team in the N.B.A. since January or February, especially on the defensive end, where their rookie head coach, Ime Udoka, has their long-limbed roster whipping around the floor, as fluid as the body of a snake. Their young star, Jayson Tatum, has undergone, it seems, the epiphany—always more conceptual than purely athletic—that accompanies a jump into the N.B.A.’s uppermost echelon. Previously a promising scorer with a penchant for taking a dribble too many into the waiting maw of the defense, or settling for an off-balance seventeen-footer instead of finding the open man, Tatum is now an ace playmaker, all quick decisions and sharp drives to the rim. He takes his wide wingspan swooping to the basket and rarely comes up totally empty. Now he lives at the free-throw line, the residence of all hoops royalty.
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Tatum’s teammates take their cues from him, passing crisply and defending sturdily. His more veteran colleague, the guard Marcus Smart, recently won the Defensive Player of the Year Award and, after years of tetchy playmaking, has reinvented himself, on offense, as a highly capable game-managing point guard. In the best play of the series so far, at the end of Game One, Smart, having collected a sharp pass from his teammate Jaylen Brown, pump-faked two defenders into the air, then delivered a spot-on pass to Tatum, who immediately went into a merengue-like spin around a defender and made a game-ending layup.
On Saturday, the Nets gave out black T-shirts at Barclays, the better to achieve a kind of galvanizing unity in the stands. Kids wore Durant and Irving jerseys, and their parents pulled on the free shirts, but all through the crowd, amid the monochrome, you could see a steady peppering of Celtic green. Some kids behind me—teen-agers, I think, or possibly young adults in their earliest twenties—yelled out generic phrases of encouragement for the home team. They were loud but didn’t sound fierce. The Nets, formerly of New Jersey, still sometimes feel like newcomers to Brooklyn, and one of my constant fascinations has been trying to figure out how, and by what avenues, their fan culture has developed. It seemed from the playoff atmosphere that they are still a team for the young and upwardly mobile. The crowd was fresh-faced and eager but kind of polite—there to take in a show as spectators more than to graft themselves, by force of shouts or groans or imprecatory utterances, onto the personality of the team.
Once the game got going, and Tatum headed to the line, one guy shouted out, “Hey, Jayson, you suck!,” and I was surprised less by the uninspired insult than by the fact that I could hear it so clearly. An older man in the row ahead of me was the most properly fanatic fan that I could see. He was in all black with a white wristband, wearing a huge hood, and stood up throughout the entire first half of the game. He led the section in chants of “DE-FENSE” and, more than once, got irritated that more people in the section weren’t standing and yelling with fervor equal to his. When someone behind him asked him to sit down for a while, he turned around and said, “It’s Game Three—I ain’t got time for all that!”
His team didn’t seem to share his urgency. The Celtics attacked Durant with a steady stream of double- and triple-teams every time he even gestured toward the ball, and covered Irving with similar diligence. Their high-energy castmate Bruce Brown was left largely open, and made a few threes and drives to the hoop, picking up the scoring slack from the superstars. Durant made a shot or two—a three with eight minutes left in the first quarter seemed like a harbinger of friskiness to come; maybe he’d finally joined the game!—but he mostly jogged from hoop to hoop while looking sort of lost. When the best players are under duress, their problems often seem more intellectual than purely athletic; they look less thwarted than puzzled, “blocked” mysteriously, like overthinking writers. LeBron James gave off a similarly mystified vibe back in the 2011 Finals, when his favored Miami Heat lost to the Dallas Mavericks. Now Durant played Hamlet-on-Flatbush, trying and failing to achieve some resolution that would enable him to act.
Meanwhile, Tatum thrived. Toward the end of the first quarter, guarded by the lean big man Nic Claxton, he dribbled away from the sideline and toward the center of the court. Then he stopped quickly and sent a few quick, purposeful bounces through his legs like warning sirens of the move to come. He drove left, gave one artfully syncopated feinting hesitation, and pulled up for a shot while fading toward the baseline: cash. The game—the whole series, really—was his. In the second quarter, he was almost having fun: he threw a short, happy lob to his big man, Robert Williams III, after shuffling his feet and daring Seth Curry, another unfortunate briefly tasked with guarding him, to foul him from behind. Williams’s dunk put the Celtics up by twelve, but it felt more like twenty. The Nets would stay alive, and sometimes tighten the gap, but, without the usual insistence of Durant, it never looked like they’d win. By the end, it seemed clear that they were going to lose not just the game but the series. Their season was done.
Game Four had the quality of an epilogue. I watched it on television. The Nets changed the colors on the court and on their jerseys to the franchise’s vintage blue and red, as if to forestall a funeral by putting away the dress blacks. But, again, the Celtics were draped all over Durant. He seemed to perk up, at last, finishing with thirty-nine points, but he missed most of the many shots he took—his shooting percentage stayed stubbornly around forty per cent, a mark of how thoroughly pestered he’d been. The subsequent loss—completing a sweep that even the worst Nets pessimist wouldn’t have predicted—felt almost merciful. I thought of those shoulders, and what they’ve carried, and the loneliness suggested by that image of Durant, which seemed apt. Now it was time for him to go home, think things over, and start again.
