The Brooklyn Nets made a huge trade and took a big risk to acquire James Harden. Harden is now reunited with Kevin Durant which gives Brooklyn two of the best offensive players in the NBA. They've played together before and they should mesh smoothly. How Kyrie Irving factors into all of this is the big question everyone is asking at the moment.

On the daily Locked On Nets Podcast, host Doug Norrie reacts to the James Harden trade and explains why the Nets may have traded for him to replace Kyrie Irving… just in case.

Doug Norrie: The situation has turned out really bad really quickly with Kyrie Irving and we've been on the Kyrie apology train for a little bit here so this is not just me dumping on the guy… There's probably some sense that the Nets might not have known what they were buying here. It's not really working out and the timelines are starting to look weird. By the way, Anthony Puccio had a great comparison of this whole situation to last year where Kyrie sat out eight weeks with an injury that we never got any news about. I never really thought about that piece until he wrote that and I thought that was totally spot on. This situation almost mirrors the exact timing of that injury in terms of how many games in this sort of thing happened.

So I wonder if this combination of pieces meant that the Nets thought it was time to seek out another Kevin Durant placation piece and James Harden just turned out to be it. If we're looking at the future, and this might end up being the future, I just don't know how Kyrie figures in here. It's so weird, I just don't know how it figures in, how does he walk back in and just start playing with these dudes.