It had to end this way, of course: the basketball in Kyrie Irving’s hands, 17,732 eyes laser-focused on him. There were 14.5 seconds left in overtime. The Nets trailed Minnesota 127-126, and Irving was going to rectify that. He already had 50 points in the bank. He had a couple more to get.
Who was going to tell him no?
“I wanted to win this for the fans, for my teammates,” he would say. “We all did.”
It isn’t possible to welcome a new town, a new team, and a new base of fans any more spectacularly than Irving did, in the Nets’ opener against the Timberwolves at Barclays Center.