The Golden State Warriors were on the verge of a decade-long dynasty, but Kevin Durant opted to sign with the Brooklyn Nets in 2019.
In 2016, Kevin Durant became public enemy number one among NBA fans when he left the Oklahoma City Thunder to sign with the Golden State Warriors, who were coming off the most regular season wins of all time.
Durant and the Warriors made three Finals, won two of them, and were easily the best team the league had ever seen up until that point.
Amid their successes, however, it was clear that it wasn’t a perfect marriage, and Durant signed with the Brooklyn Nets just three years after inking a deal with the Dubs.
Durant, as it’s become clear, does not respond well to criticism. He and LeBron James and Stephen Curry are easily the three best players of the 21st century, but he still is rather sensitive to being called out for on-court shortcomings, as few and far between as they are.
Warriors’ teammate Draymond Green, however, is one of the most outspoken players the league has ever seen. He isn’t one to back down from a fight, and he is quick to call both teammates and opponents out.
It’s safe to say that pairing Durant and Green was not a recipe for success.
In a Nov. 2018 game, at the start of Durant’s final season in Golden State, Green secured a rebound in the final seconds before pushing the ball up the floor, resulting in a turnover.
Durant was asking for the ball the entire time, but Green instead took the ball across halfcourt himself. The Warriors would go on to lose in overtime to the Clippers.
Green and Durant had a very vocal and public argument after that game, where Green accused Durant of not being totally bought into the team, suggesting that the Warriors would win without him.
In the wake of the fight, the Warriors demanded that Green apologize, and when he refused, they suspended him for one game.
Later, former Warriors would agree that the fight was blown out of proportion and really wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t handled internally.
“If we don’t address the situation, it’s never gonna get handled,” explained Quinn Cook, who was on the Warriors in 2018. “And we just never handled the situation. Never. And it hurts us.”
While there is strong evidence suggesting that Green ran Durant out of town, if the franchise was given a choice, it would have likely chosen KD over Green.
Steve Kerr thinks the battle between superstars had very little to do with Durant’s choice to be signed and traded to the Nets.
He had suffered a torn Achilles in the 2018 finals, a moment he described as the worst of his career.
“I think that last year that he was here, he was visibly wanting to move on,” Kerr revealed on the Dan Le Batard Show in September.
“We could feel it, and that was his choice as a free agent. Everything that he gave to us and brought to us. We will be thankful for that forever.”
Durant won two rings with the Warriors. Since leaving, he has made the All-Star Game in every season where he wasn’t injured, but he has been unable to make the Finals without Curry and Green.
Based on both Kerr and Cook’s assessment, it would seem like the public arguments between Green and Durant were little more than on-court spats, and the real reason Durant left was because he wanted to be the star of the team.
In Golden State, Curry was the golden boy, and Durant was tired of being the second star. He and Green have since made nice.
“It wasn’t the argument, it was the way that everybody, Steve Kerr acted like it didn’t happen, and Bob Myers tried to just discipline you and think that that would put the mask over everything,” Durant told Green in 2021. “I really felt like that was such a big situation for us as a group.”
Both Durant and Green will now admit that Kerr and Myers jumped to conclusions too fast and tried to do damage control, which ultimately alienated Durant to the point that he wanted to play elsewhere.
