The Brooklyn Nets were once considered one of the marquee teams in the NBA when they had Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving on the roster to guide the franchise to a championship. During the 2021-22 season, Brooklyn traded James Harden to the Philadelphia 76ers in exchange for Ben Simmons, a decision that Irving reflected on a few years after the fact.

“I’m gonna say that out loud, but when that happened and we got Ben, a lot more pressure started to come in on our franchise,” Irving said during a recent livestream on his Twitch channel. Irving has spent some time this offseason addressing some of his past with the Nets, including playing with Durant and for head coach Steve Nash, but the Simmons-Harden trade is just part of Irving’s journey in Brooklyn.

“Not only do we have this going on, but also we have a situation that Ben is dealing with where everybody trying to micromanage the spun narrative like he’s doing this, he’s doing that,” Irving continued. “So, it wasn’t a fair trade at the outset, right? It was not at all. I didn’t feel like that was a fair trade, but at the same time, when it happened, he went to our division.”

To Irving’s point, the Nets did not appear as formidable as they did with Harden on the roster, especially since Simmons was unable to play during the 2021-22 campaign due to back surgery. With Harden on the team during the 2020-21 season, Brooklyn had the best season that the franchise has had since the 2013-14 campaign as Harden, Durant, and Irving made it to the Eastern Conference Semifinals in 2021.

While the end of that series will come down to whether Durant’s shoe was just too big for the Nets to take the season further, it became clear that Harden wanting out was the beginning of the end for Brooklyn. More to Irving’s point, Simmons wasn’t able to recapture the form that he was once had during his All-Star days with the 76ers and the Nets eventually had to waive Simmons once his value became too low to pull off a trade.

This article originally appeared on Nets Wire: Kyrie Irving gives take on Nets trading James Harden for Ben Simmons