NEW YORK — In news that would be bigger if not for his team’s coaching change and his teammate’s antisemitism scandal: Ben Simmons will miss the Brooklyn Nets‘ next two games because of soreness and swelling in his left knee. 

Interim coach Jacque Vaughn said Thursday that Simmons would not travel with the Nets to Washington, D.C., where they will visit the Wizards on Friday, or Charlotte, where they will visit the Hornets on Saturday. Their road trip concludes with a game in Dallas on Monday, but Simmons could potentially meet them there and suit up against the Mavericks. 

“I’m going to say [he will miss the] first two for sure just because of the back-to-back,” Vaughn said, “and then we’ll kind of assess and see where he is after that.”

Simmons last played on Oct. 29 against the Indiana Pacers, a 125-116 loss in which Brooklyn’s defense was “a disaster,” in the words of then-coach Steve Nash. He has missed two games since then: a 116-109 win in a rematch against the Pacers and a 108-99 loss against the Chicago Bulls, the latter with Vaughn in Nash’s place.

In Simmons’ absence, the Nets have started a lineup of Kyrie Irving, Joe Harris, Royce O’Neale, Kevin Durant and Nic Claxton, which has been awesome in an extremely small sample size. (This five-man unit has logged 36 minutes in four games, with a plus-18.6 point differential — 105.1 points per 100 possessions on offense, 86.4 per 100 on…