Mike Francesa is not letting Kevin Durant off the hook.
The Nets star’s legacy has taken a major hit with his poor play amid the team’s playoff collapse, the former WFAN voice said on his latest BetRivers podcast. And it will take work to restore the luster he has lost.
“Durant has hurt his legacy. He needs to rescue it,” Francesa said ahead of Monday’s Game 4 at Barclays Center with the Nets down 3-0 to the Celtics in their first-round series.
“If he thinks it was solid gold, if you want to stay on the level that he was approaching with his recent postseason performances gone by, you can damage those dramatically and he has done that in the biggest of ways. More than he realizes, how much he has damaged his legacy. And Durant was good enough to have a legacy.
“Forget (Kyrie) Irving. To me, Irving is always going to be a clown. Durant is a great player. He had a legacy, he had a burgeoning legacy. He had done severe damage to it.”
Francesa did not take aim at Ben Simmons for bailing out of his much-anticipated Nets debut at the last minute. But he did torch the entire organization as a whole, implying general manager Sean Marks and head coach Steve Nash should be in trouble.
“How big of an embarrassment are the Nets in every way?” Francesa said. “For the way they went about doing this, for the way they allowed players to treat the process. From every single aspect of this to have their players perform this way, to have this franchise look this way on the floor in these playoffs is nothing short of an utter disgrace. They should be ashamed of themselves. From the front office through the last guy on the team, the Nets should be ashamed of themselves of the product they have put forth so far. … The changes the Nets need are from the top down. And it stops on many levels.”
