It’s hard to believe that it’s been less than a year since Kevin Durant and Draymond Green got into it with one another over an end of game situation against the Clippers. Green didn’t pass Durant the ball, which led to the game heading to overtime and the two clashing, with emotions boiling over and Green bringing up Durant’s impending free agency. It apparently go to the point where Green straight up told Durant to leave once the summer rolled around, which ended up happening.
Now, Durant will take this season off to recover from the Achilles injury he suffered during the 2019 NBA Finals and make his Nets debut next season, while Green is left to lead a Warriors that received its latest bit of bad news on Wednesday night, when Steph Curry broke his hand. But that heated moment against the Clippers still looms pretty large, in part because of an appearance Durant made on ESPN’s First Take on Thursday morning.
Durant was asked about whether his argument with Green played a role in his decision to head to Brooklyn, and admitted that it did, indeed, factor into his thinking.
Kevin Durant admits beef with Draymond Green led to him leaving Golden State pic.twitter.com/tnZDm39WX2
— Gifdsports (@gifdsports) October 31, 2019
“A little bit, yeah,” Durant said. “For sure.”
Durant went onto say that “you think about it a little bit” when you’re spoken to that way by a teammate, but that wasn’t the only thing that impacted his thought process. As he explained, Durant thought he needed a change of scenery.
“I just felt like I needed a switch,” Durant said. “I felt like a lot of stuff in Golden State had reared its head, and I felt like we … that was just gonna be the end no matter what, especially for that group. Shaun Livingston was retiring, Andre Iguodala was getting older, our contracts were gonna stifle the team and put us in a hole to get other players. So I was just, like, it was time for all of us to kinda separate.”
Durant’s run with the Dubs was incredibly successful, winning a pair of titles and back-to-back NBA Finals MVP awards. Still, the rumblings of Durant wanting to leave Golden State for New York existed before any run-in with Green, so it’s probably safe to say that was more one of the factors that played a role in all of this than something that tipped the scales in one direction over the other.
