Reports: Nets Willing to Keep Kevin Durant Next Season
The Phoenix Suns' pursuit of Kevin Durant began almost immediately after the superstar forward told the Brooklyn Nets he wanted to be traded.
It's been nearly two weeks since that request, and not much has changed. The Suns are still without Durant along with every other interested team in the league.
Talks were supposed to advance when decision-makers pulled together at the Summer League in Las Vegas, yet reports out of Sin City suggest that Nets general manager Sean Marks is willing to hold onto Durant until they get the package they believe is worthy, even if that means keeping him for next season.
Do other teams around the league believe it?
Report: Nets Willing to Keep Kevin Durant Next Season
"There's a trade request in, so you have to get on the same page as him (Durant)," said ESPN's Brian Windhorst on ESPN's "Get Up".
"I think where the Nets are right now is, as I mentioned earlier, they don't have the trade offers that they like. And you can imagine if you put your house for sale and you didn't get the offers you wanted and you didn't have to move, you could take your house off the market and try it again.
"That is something the Nets have plausible deniability in. But I have to tell you as I've talked to league executives out there, they don't believe that's necessarily going to happen. They believe that's the Nets posturing at this point. Unless Durant gives some sort of indication he's on board with it, it's not effecting the offers yet. We're in the second week of July, we have two and a half months until the start of the season. There is no reason for anybody to get drastic with their moves right now.
"But the Nets making this maneuver and sort of letting it be known in the market that they might have Durant just come back, I think is a reaction to the offers they're getting."
Fellow ESPN NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski also carried the same tone when speaking about Durant last week.
"If you’re the Nets, you can get a sense of how far some teams are going to go, and if you’ve feel like they’ve gone as far as they’re going to go with you. Is that good enough for Kevin Durant? Because in any scenario you’re probably not getting value for Kevin Durant. There’s no deal where you can say, 'Hey, we’re better for this. It’s just the best you can get.' And again, with the four years left on his contract, you could wait it out," said Wojnarowski.
It appears there's two different sides to the Durant saga.
If you're Brooklyn, you're absolutely not budging until you see a trade offer that you like.
If you're the rest of the league, you're banking on Durant forcing his way out of the Nets and ultimately pushing his chips to the middle of the table on a new destination.
One side will balk, but only time will tell who emerges victorious in negotiations.
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