NEW YORK — When Kyrie Irving’s trade request was reported on Friday, Brooklyn Nets center Nic Claxton’s phone started going crazy.
“I was taking a nap,” Claxton said before Brooklyn’s 125-123 win against the Washington Wizards on Saturday. “And I looked in one of my group chats and I saw it, and I was like, ‘Wow.’ Just caught me off guard. But it is what it is.”
Nets wing Royce O’Neale said he was “surprised” by Irving’s trade request, adding that he found out the “same way everybody else did: Twitter.”
“We’re just like everybody else,” Claxton said. “We’re caught off guard.”
Irving’s future in Brooklyn is uncertain. He “reported some calf soreness,” coach Jacque Vaughn said, so he missed the Wizards game. Claxton said he learned that Irving would be out of the lineup “when I got here.”
Before the game, Vaughn said he wasn’t sure whether or not Irving would be at Barclays Center. Afterward, Vaughn said that Irving was not in the building and it was an excused absence. The Nets started guard Edmond Sumner in his place, and Sumner scored a career-high 29 points in a career-high 39 minutes. Brooklyn was down by 23 points in the first quarter, trailed by 18 at halftime and came back on the strength of a career night from wing Cam Thomas, who scored 19 of his 44 points in the fourth quarter.
“I think there was a little trickle effect why it was a 23-point deficit or whatever it was,” Nets guard Patty Mills said. “I think it’s adversity, it’s distractions, it’s stuff away from the court that probably saw us be affected by that at the beginning of the game. It’s just about trying to regroup [and get] the guys together. And I think we just went down that path a little bit and it took us to get down that much, take a little bit of a backside-beating, before we realized and could regroup at halftime in the locker room.”
Brooklyn was without Kevin Durant (sprained right MCL) and Ben Simmons (left knee soreness). Seth Curry left the game early in the third quarter with left adductor tightness and Markieff Morris was ruled out for the…
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