After trying season, Joe Harri...

There were six men smiling on stage, each stretching a white Brooklyn Nets jersey with their last name and chosen number stitched in black. There was a former top overall pick, an international sensation and a first-round choice from the 2016 NBA draft. And there was new Brooklyn general manager Sean Marks, who spent that July assembling his very first roster as a lead executive of his own front office. Anthony Bennett’s Nets career would last only 23 games. Just five appearances into his three-year, $36 million deal, Jeremy Lin’s hamstring came up limp, and it wasn’t long before Brooklyn offloaded his contract and injury woes elsewhere. Caris LeVert ultimately exited Marks’ rebuild when the Nets pried James Harden from the Houston Rockets, a necessary cost of conducting superstar business. However large a footprint he’s left on this organization, Nets staffers felt his absence throughout their troubled 2021-22 campaign. A November ankle injury and rehab complications left Brooklyn’s best floor spacer, a career 43.6% marksman from distance, sidelined for the remainder of the season. No matter how well Harden or Kevin Durant or Kyrie Irving can freelance with the basketball, any team, any super-team, will feel the visceral gravity suck from losing one of the league’s sharpest shooters. And as their first-round series slipped away against the Boston Celtics, a common refrain among Nets personnel simply highlighted how much everybody missed Joe.

“You lose, so everybody wants to be like, ‘Oh, why did we lose?’ This and that, certain guys were out or banged up, whatever it might have been,” Harris told Yahoo Sports. “I think had our momentum been a little bit different going into the playoffs, it probably would have been a different situation.”

His eventual return that season was supposed to function as some form of catalyst. Harris opted against full reconstructive surgery that fall, clinging to any hope he could return to Brooklyn’s star-studded lineup. Even for 10 or 15 minutes each night. But the joint never regained its full range of motion. Bone was grinding against bone. He tried four or five different custom ankle braces, yet no modification allowed Harris to move at the speed of which an NBA game requires. You can’t scurry around the perimeter, slingshotting around screens, with a wobbly tire.

“It’s taxing. I thought that I could get back, when the reality was that my ankle was not in a good spot,” Harris said. “I exhausted basically every single option that I could. Pretty much anything you could possibly think of to get me back on the floor.”

“Sometimes you fake it until you make it, but you gotta have energy when you play and throughout the course of the season, otherwise it makes it really tough,” Harris said. “And, you know, we just kinda collectively talk about it as a group just making sure that everybody’s bringing energy and the right sort of energy, too. It’s easy to go the opposite direction and not enjoy it.”