We Miss Kevin Durant’s Wonderfully Weird Old Twitter Feed

When you think of Kevin Durant, you think of a ruthless scorer whose life goal is to win an NBA championship. You think of the skinny kid who went to Texas, the budding star in Seattle who turned into the superstar in Oklahoma City. You think of his decision to leave the Thunder to join Golden State, making an unprecedented move in which he left a really good basketball team to join a squad that won 73 games the year before.

You think of the clutch shots, you think of the fact that he scores so easily, you think of the fact that he seems like he is capable of scoring 50 whenever he wants, but he’s so cerebral that he wants to pick his spots instead of fill it up.

I would like to suggest that you start thinking of him as a spectacular Twitter user when you hear his name. Sure, stuff like this is nice, but ultimately not memorable…

… nor are the retweets of brands and generic “Hey, my team won, ain’t that cool?” tweets that you see out of every athlete.

Instead, let’s get in a time machine and go back to before Durant was KEVIN DURANT. Let’s go back to when he was still just a young NBA player who made his Twitter bio “IM ME, I DO ME, AND I CHILL” and used Twitter like, you know, a person. Not some athlete who went to Athlete Social Media School™ and learned how to tweet like everyone else, just a dude with a cell phone and access to the Twitter app.

Kevin Durant Understands Loneliness

In a way, this feeling is kind of refreshing. But for the most part, same.

Kevin Durant Is Smooth as Silk

Let’s take a second to look at all of these and remember that one of the best basketball players on earth – someone who over the last few years has turned into a single-minded robot whose mission is to win a championship – used to be so … human.

He was in the NBA at this point, but in these instances, he was not Kevin Durant, an NBA player with all the talent in the world who would one day become arguably the second-best basketball player on earth. He was Kevin Durant, the guy who has crushes on celebrities.

Honestly, if athletes tweeted like this – not the creeping on women thing, that’s kinda weird, but if they tweeted like people and not brands with limbs – it would be fantastic. Basketball players are admittedly better than most other athletes at doing this, but no one is perfect.

Kevin Durant Discusses Loyalty

Ok, so you’ve seen these tweets before from when Durant made the decision to leave Oklahoma City and join the Golden State Warriors. Both of these pointed out the hypocrisy of Durant’s decision – one rallied against superteams, the other was him discussing his desire to play in Oklahoma for his entire career.

But consider what had happened since he sent these tweets. LeBron James and Steph Curry started winning titles. Meanwhile, Durant was left in the dust. He was being added to lists of the best players to never win a ring. Long story short, he turned into someone whose career was looking like it was going to be judged as one that never featured an NBA championship, no matter how good he is.

So I don’t think you can hold these against him too terribly much. As really every tweet in here illustrates, Kevin Durant in 2009-10 and Kevin Durant in 2016 are two incredibly different versions of the same person. That doesn’t make any of these other tweets any less funny, it just adds context to maybe his two most controversial tweets.

Kevin Durant Struggles To Sleep Sometimes

All of us have struggled to sleep at one time or another. Sometimes, it’s because we’re worried about having enough cash to pay the bills at the end of the month. Sometimes, it’s because of something going on in a relationship, either personal or professional. Sometimes it’s just because we had too many cups of coffee during the day.

This is still oddly specific. We all have had things that keep us up at night, but Durant brings us through what appears to be an exact scenario as it happens. He is live tweeting a feeling of overwhelming despair that keeps him up at night. Well, save for the fact that he apparently tweeted this one afternoon.

Based on the Thunder’s schedule from the 2009-10 season, they were in San Antonio on this day. Considering the time zone, he sent this around 2:30 p.m. He also had a rough game that night – the Thunder lost to the Spurs, 95-87. Durant had 21 points on 7-for-19 shooting with 12 rebounds. Total aside: the starting centers in that game were Nenad Kristic and Antonio McDyess, which rules.

Kevin Durant Is a Master of Metaphors

One, I need to know if Durant has ever actually used this line in real life. Two, this made me think back on every bacon and egg sandwich I have ever seen in my life. I cannot ever remember gazing upon one and thinking anything other than “that looks good.” So kudos to KD for having a pickup line in his arsenal that seems silly on the surface but the more you think about it the more sense it makes.

This is the best breakfast food-related pickup line since “Girl, you’re thicker than a bowl of oatmeal.”

Kevin Durant Has a Second Career In Astronomy

Considering a number of NBA players have revealed that they are kinda sorta flat earth truthers over the course of this season, this isn’t too silly of a take. Sure, it’s silly, but “how can we know what’s happening on the sun if we’ve never been there” is more reasonable than “the earth is flat,” right?

This is still on the short list for the funniest sportsperson tweet of all time in my mind – it’s up there with Dion Waiters tweeting “Men lie women lie BUCKETS DNT” and Stephen A. Smith’s immortal “TAke a look, y’all: IMG_4346.jpeg” tweet. The thought of Durant sitting at a club, gaze locked upon a television that has History Channel on, skeptical of the concept of what happens on the sun is amazing. And then he decides to take the tweet through it approach to his skepticism.

Again, this tweet is an example of why his Twitter account was so much fun. He was being a dude with thoughts that occasionally crossed his mind and expressed them in a way that was endearing.

Also, it’s kinda unusual that he’s watching television and tweeting while at the club, right? Well …

Kevin Durant Loves Twitter

… I cannot say I disagree.