NBA scout says Kyrie Irving openly defied Steve Nash’s play calls originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
How dysfunctional are the Brooklyn Nets, you ask? A report from the New York Post’s Brian Lewis about sums it up.
Lewis spoke to an NBA advance scout with “years” of experience who attended the Nets’ game against the Indiana Pacers on Oct. 29 (three days before head coach Steve Nash was fired) and witnessed guard Kyrie Irving do something he had never seen in an NBA game before.
“On 10 separate occasions, Nash called a specific play and the scout watched Irving do something entirely different,” Lewis wrote.
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The scout said he was shocked by Irving’s open defiance of his head coach.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” the scout told Lewis. “Nash would call something, and he’d run the opposite. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
The Nets lost that game to fall to 1-5 on the season, and Brooklyn parted ways with Nash on Nov. 1. Two days after that, the Nets suspended Irving for a reason completely unrelated to basketball, as Irving failed to “disavow antisemitism” after sharing a film filled with anti-Semitic tropes on his social media platform.
Irving remains suspended, and while his off-court actions are much more consequential than him blowing off Nash’s play calls, it sounds like there was a clear disconnect between Irving’s Nets and their head coach.
“A source close to the situation told The Post that Nash was ‘technically the coach,’ but that no matter what game plan he gave the Nets, ‘they did whatever they wanted,'” Lewis wrote.
The Nets have won two of their last three games under interim head coach Jacque Vaughn, so perhaps a new voice will help them right the ship after a 4-7 start. (Brooklyn reportedly planned to hire suspended Boston Celtics head coach Ime Udoka to replace Nash but since has received pushback, per a report.)
But as fans of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics would tell you, this level of dysfunction has unfortunately become the standard for Irving, who has now had nine head coaches in 12 NBA seasons.