Kevin Durant Wants ‘As Much Money As I Can’ Get In His Next Contract

Kevin Durant free agency talk may have calmed down a bit now that his teammates aren’t mentioning his pending departure from the Warriors on the floor. Still, the undercurrent that follows Durant through the NBA season is that he’s weighing his options at the end of his current deal, and many think his time in Oakland will soon come to a close.

That kind of talk is only reinforced when Durant talks publicly about his free agency, as he did on Monday when a podcast interview with Yahoo’s Chris B Haynes was released. In it, Durant said that his future plans involve, well, making a lot of money on the open market.

“I just want to make sure I get as much money as I can on my next deal so I can stack up my money and figure it out,” Durant said. “That’s the plan: play basketball and stack money.”

Normally that wouldn’t be news: players should always try to maximize their value and get as much money as possible. That’s pretty standard, really. But it does not exactly jive with what’s been happening in Golden State over the years, with players like Durant taking less to keep a dynasty together. Durant has made it clear that he’s done with that, and it doesn’t mean Golden State is completely out of the picture, but it’s not a great sign.

One other snipped shared on the podcast is that Durant doesn’t need a long courtship from teams when he hits the market in July.

“Nobody can recruit me no more,” Durant said. He explained that he wants to “dictate the environment I want to be in,” teams can’t do much to change his mind about where he wants to play next.

Whether that means he already has his mind made up or he simply wants to save teams the hassle of planning intricate free agent presentations isn’t clear just yet, but it does mean that Durant has a clear head going into this. We just don’t know what team he’s thinking about right now. We don’t know much, really, other than that he plans to stack that money.