The Brooklyn Nets remain unstaffed after announcing that Kevin Durant, Blake Griffin and LaMarcus Aldridge are out Wednesday night against the Philadelphia 76ers, plus star James Harden remains out of action.
The good news for Brooklyn is that Kyrie Irving is available to play after losing Tuesday’s game against the Minnesota Timberwolves while attending to a family affair.
The Nets are also without escort Chris Chiozza. Chiozza, who started instead of Irving on Tuesday, underwent hand surgery on Wednesday to repair a fracture in his right finger. He suffered the injury against the Timberwolves.
Harden is still offside with a strain on his right curve tendon and Tyler Johnson is still feeling pain in his right knee.
Aldridge will not play for a non-VOCID illness, and Griffin is on a day of injury handling with a knee problem.
On Tuesday, Durant played 27 minutes against the Timberwolves, even as the Nets took the lead to 40 points. Nash said the Nets want to keep increasing their playing time to 30 minutes, but it’s a “complicated balance.”
“You need to play a certain amount of minutes for your benefit,” Nash said Tuesday. “At the same time, when the game is so out of control, you think, do we want to risk being out here at this point in the game? In an ideal world, I would play about 30 minutes, but at the same time “He’s out there at the end of the game in pointless minutes, and you have to be careful too. We’re trying to find that balance.”
While saying on Tuesday that increasing his workload felt “okay” and that he would determine his status for Wednesday after seeing how his body recovered and consulting with the team’s training staff.
While saying that playing against the 76ers, who are competing with the Nets for number one spot in the Eastern Conference, was something the team eagerly anticipated, but as a group they were more focused on having the whole team in the track together. After all, the Big 3 of the Nets have played just seven games together.
According to Elias Sports, the minimum number of games played together by any champion’s top three scorers during the regular season is 10 when Shaquille O’Neal-Kobe Bryant-Derek Fisher’s Lakers won in 2001. After Wednesday, the Nets only they will have 17 games left in the regular season.
“I think for us we want everyone to be healthy and acclimatized to what we’re doing and I think that’s as important as setting the timeline for the Philadelphia game,” Durant said. “They’re a great team, they’re well-trained and I’m sure it’s a team we’ll meet soon, but for us at this point we want to keep fine-tuning what we do to improve on the things that make us who we are, and we’ll see what happens in the future “.