The Brooklyn Nets once assembled a roster featuring Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden, but their superteam never came close to reaching its championship potential. A new ranking now names Brooklyn’s 2020-23 squad the biggest sports dream team nightmare.
The Brooklyn Nets’ 2020-23 era is still one of the biggest “what if?” stories in recent NBA history.
What was supposed to be a championship superteam instead became one of the most disappointing stretches in franchise history, and a recent ranking put the Nets at the very top of the list of sports dream teams that turned into nightmares.
It is hard to argue with the amount of star power Brooklyn had on paper.
The Nets signed Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving during the 2019 offseason, giving the franchise two superstar players to build around. Durant was forced to miss the entire 2019-20 season while recovering from the Achilles injury he suffered during the 2019 NBA Finals, while Irving played just 20 games because of shoulder surgery.
That meant the highly anticipated duo never really got a chance to establish itself during their first season together.
Things changed the following year dramatically.
Brooklyn hired Steve Nash as its head coach and then made one of the biggest trades in recent NBA history, acquiring James Harden from the Houston Rockets in January 2021.
Suddenly, the Nets had three of the league’s biggest stars on the same roster.
The expectations were enormous.
And for a brief period, Brooklyn looked like it could live up to them.
The problem was that Durant, Irving, and Harden rarely had the opportunity to play together.
The Nets made it to the second round of the 2021 playoffs, but injuries completely changed their postseason. Harden suffered a hamstring injury in Game 1 of the second round, while Irving injured his ankle in Game 4 against the Milwaukee Bucks.
Durant was then left to carry the team, and Brooklyn came within inches of advancing.
Durant’s potential game-winning three-pointer in Game 7 appeared to send the Nets to the Eastern Conference Finals, only for his foot to be ruled on the three-point line.
The shot was a two-pointer, sending the game to overtime and eventually ending Brooklyn’s season.
That moment ultimately became one of the defining images of the entire era.
The following season brought even more problems.
Irving was unable to play home games for much of the season because of New York City's COVID-19 vaccine mandate, while Harden eventually requested a trade. Brooklyn sent him to Philadelphia in exchange for Ben Simmons, who ultimately missed the remainder of the season with a back injury.
The Nets still won 44 games, but their season ended with a first-round sweep at the hands of the Boston Celtics.
By the beginning of the 2022-23 season, the situation had completely unraveled.
Nash was fired just seven games into the season, and Irving was eventually traded to the Dallas Mavericks. Durant followed shortly afterward, getting sent to the Phoenix Suns.
Just a few years earlier, Brooklyn had assembled what looked like one of the most talented rosters in basketball.
Instead, the trio of Durant, Irving and Harden played just 16 games together.
That number says almost everything about why the Nets ended up on Reuter’s list.
The talent was never really the question. The problem was that Brooklyn never got to see what its superstar trio could actually accomplish when healthy and available at the same time.
For Nets fans, the 2020-23 era remains a painful reminder of how quickly a championship-caliber roster can fall apart.
And according to Reuter’s ranking, no other sports dream team fell further short of expectations than Brooklyn’s.
