Draymond Green’s highly-anticipated interview with Kevin Durant for Bleacher Report dropped on Wednesday, with the pair making the decision to address their infamous public blow up in 2018. After Green opted against passing Durant the ball in the waning moments of regulation during a close game against the Los Angeles Clippers, the then-teammates were visibly unhappy with one another in the huddle leading into overtime.
The two have explained what happened in the years since, most recently when Green appeared on Durant’s podcast in April. But in their new interview, the pair addressed an elephant that remains in the room — whether or not this pushed Durant away from the Golden State Warriors at the end of the year when he opted to join the Brooklyn Nets — and while they agree that it did, they don’t believe the argument itself is to blame.
Instead, both Durant and Green, at the 8:35 mark of the interview, think that the response from the Warriors’ staff and front office was the thing that pushed him away.
“It wasn’t the argument,” Durant said. “It was the way that everybody … Steve Kerr act like it didn’t happen, Bob Myers tried to just discipline you and think that that would put the mask over everything. I really felt like that was such a big situation for us as a group, the first time we went through someone like that. We had to get that sh*t all out.
“I remember watching The Last Dance and when Scottie didn’t go into the game, the whole team in the locker room said, ‘Scottie, that was f*cked up that you did that,’” Durant continued. “We needed that, we just needed to throw all that sh*t out on the table and say, ‘Yo, Dray, K, that was f*cked up that we even had to go through that, let’s just wipe our hands with that and go finish the task.’ I don’t think we did that, we tried to dance around it, I just didn’t like how all of that … just the vibe between all of that, it just made sh*t weird to me, and I’d rather us be who we say we are — family first, communication is key, we didn’t show that, and that’s what really rubbed me the wrong way more than anything.”
Green then told his side of the story about the aftermath, recalling that the Warriors spoke to him for an hour and 45 minutes after they returned home about how he needed to apologize. He made clear that he was going to speak to Durant and that the team wouldn’t tell him what to say, which ultimately led to the matter being dropped until the morning. The next day, the same conversation occurred, at which point Green bluntly told the Warriors’ brass what was on his mind.
“We met the next morning, and they said, ‘Alright, you slept on it, you ready to apologize?’” Green recalled. “And I told them right then and there, I said, ‘Y’all about to f*ck this up.’ I said, ‘The only person that can make this right is me and K, and there is nothing that y’all can do, and y’all are going to f*ck this up.’ And in my opinion, they f*cked it up.”
Durant agreed, while Green went on to say that he laughed in the faces of the team’s decision makers when they told him he would receive a one-game suspension for the incident.
“Bob said to me, ‘Wow, that was not the reaction I was looking for or expecting,’” Green said. “And I said, ‘Well, either I’m gonna laugh in your face or cuss you the f*ck out, so you pick, I’ma choose laugh. I think what you’re doing is funny, and so I’ma laugh.’”
The whole conversation is fascinating — unsurprisingly, both Kevin Durant and Draymond Green are pretty honest and forthright about things in this setting — but this sticks out due to the fact that both guys are really critical of how the Warriors responded to the whole thing. Whether or not the Warriors respond to this remains to be seen, but we’re going to guess this isn’t exactly something they’re looking forward to addressing three years after it happened.
